‘The loom has a beauty and rhythm’: textile artist Diedrick Brackens on making poetry out of yarn

In his first exhibition in the UK, the American weaver threads political and personal themes into vibrant tapestries that merge the everyday with the allegorical

It is tempting to see it as a happy ending. In Diedrick Brackens’s Ttowards the greenest place on earth, two Black men in the artist’s signature silhouette form throw an arm about each other’s waists, while holding opposite ends of& a broom. Perhaps they’re about to enact the wedding folk ritual and jump& backwards over the besom, or fly& away on it like witches. One of four& large textile works in the US artist’s first UK show, Woven Stories, at the Holburne Museum in Bath, its companion pieces are somewhat less bucolic: suggestively mythic tableaux with hints of violent ritual.

Talking to the artist via Zoom from his studio in Los Angeles, however, it becomes clear the tender scene is at most a moment of reprieve. “That piece is overtly about love,” he says. “It’s such a fraught time right now. All the things I care about are in trouble: landscape, gender, race, ritual and spirituality that isn’t tied to a colonial past. But I& still quest for those things and dream of them.” Conjuring something akin to& abstract expressionist painting, the& weaving’s backdrop is made from multi-hued threads: greens mixed with steamy blue, torrid orange and yellow. It’s more heat haze than landscape, intangible, out of reach.