Woven Line Freed – Architectures of Light (from a 21st Century Apocalypse)

<p dir="ltr">Research Background: “Woven Line Freed – Architectures of Light (from a 21st Century Apocalypse”) investigates the expansion of the woven line beyond its tapestry containment into architectural and textile space. Presented within Floating Lines (2025), the work re-situates previously unseen fragments and samples as autonomous research artefacts, testing how the woven line, released from the structure of warp and weft, can exist as a suspended field of colour and illumination. Engaging the figure of John, reimagined from El Greco’s Apostle John of Revelation, and the Star tapestry sample, the work examines intersections of light, edge, theology, and line in tapestry form. </p><p dir="ltr">Research Question: How can the released woven line and luminous form articulate a metaphysical balance between order and release, matter and spirit, within contemporary visual art and theology? </p><p dir="ltr">Research Significance: By releasing the line into spatial and luminous suspension, The Woven Line Freed reframes the textile surface and edge as an active threshold between the visible and the unseen. It establishes an architecture of light as both poetic and analytical, advancing discourse on textile, theology, and abstraction. Curatorial validation within Floating Lines evidences the research’s significance, placing it within national dialogues on tapestry and the continuing evolution of the line through time. Research Contribution: The research develops a new vocabulary in which thread, light, figuration, and geometry act as agents of radiant translation between material and metaphysical registers. Drawing on Michelle P. Brown’s articulation of illumination as revelation (Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, Getty 1994), the work reinterprets medieval conceptions of sacred light through a contemporary textile idiom. Each unbound strand becomes a material line of illumination, oscillating between drawing and architectonics. This methodology contributes new knowledge to how material and theological systems and narratives converge through textile and spatial practice.</p>