A joyful textile public art installation by Margo Selby, immersive in colour, form and sound, suspended from the heights of Blackburn Cathedral - is formed of 100 metres of printed and pleated fabric in celebration of Standfast & Barracks’ Centenary year, each single tone chosen by 160 employees with a memory or story in mind.

A sound piece by composer Peter Coyte accompanies the installation, with recordings from Morecambe Brass Band.

A co-commission by The National Festival of Making and British Textile Biennial.

The handwoven Nexus Series are made on a 24 shaft dobby loom. Making is a lengthy process of first designing the composition with colours and proportions, preparing the loom, winding the yarn and setting up the warp – before weaving can even begin. A work is made of hundreds of threads each hand-placed and positioned.

Margo often works in series, developing an idea, in colour and composition, across a number of unique works. Nexus describes this connection, as each work links to the one before.

Handwoven Cotton/Silk/Tencel, these works were made in 2023/24.

Image credit | Cristina Schek | British Art Fair 2024

This series, begun in 2022, is Margo’s ode to the square – the primary woven form. An infinite number of variations can be found as the compositions oscillate between dynamism and symmetry. They are abstract colour studies of full chroma and desaturation. The modular pattern of intersecting orthogonals recalls the iconography of both the Bauhaus and Constructivist Art movements.

Margo's use of colour is instinctive and joyful – blocks of colour interacting. The proportions are arrived at by way of combining intuition and measurement. In a game of scale, moving from micro to macro, each composition is a development of weave structures blown-up and abstracted. The method of production requires exact planning and complex mathematical calculation.

These works are available through the Margo Selby Studio or our appointed gallery partners.

The Zoetrope series, begun in 2020, centres on a narrow vertical format, displayed in multiples. The graduating forms give the impression of motion and light taking inspiration from the zoetrope; a playful nineteenth century device that gives the optical illusion of movement.

Zoetrope I, II and III are conceived as triptychs, but works in this series can be commissioned for larger sequences (or pairs). Smaller studies are also available.

These works are available through the Margo Selby Studio or our appointed gallery partners.