Dovecot Studio Weavers Bring The Caged Bird’s Song To Life in Vivid Tapestry

Perhaps the finest and most boundary breaking examples can be seen at Dovecot tapestry studio, located in a light-filled former Victorian bath house in the heart of Edinburgh. Since its inception in 1912, Dovecot has worked with artists including British greats Stanley Spencer, Edward Bawden, Cecil Beaton, Peter Blake and David Hockney as well as international luminaries like Helen Frankenthaler and Frank Stella, for whom Dovecot wove a suite of Had Gadya tapestries in the 1980s to be hung in the PepsiCo corporation headquarters in New York.

The studio has also enjoyed long standing relationships with the Scottish female artists Barbara Rae and Elizabeth Blackadder, whose first tapestry Still Life (Tulips) was woven by Dovecot in 1966 shortly after the studio hired its first woman weaver. Today, its master artisans are equally adept at translating works by Turner or Raphael into gargantuan tapestries as they are interpreting young Zimbabwean-Scottish visual artist Sekai Machache’s exploration of blue into a tapestry of cotton and linen the next.  

One of the studio’s most spellbinding projects was helping the Turner Prize-winning, Manchester-born, Trinidad-based artist Chris Ofili to bring his watercolor painting The Caged Bird’s Song vividly and viscerally to life as a expansive triptych tapestry. It took over four years and five weavers to realize the works which were commissioned by The Clothworkers’ Company (founded by the Royal Charter in 1528 to promote British textiles) to hang permanently in its Livery Hall. Finished in 2017, The Caged Bird’s Song debuted at the National Gallery in London. “I was interested to see if (the medium of tapestry) could capture soft, fluid transitions… with no hard edges… so that the work was, like a Giorgio Morandi (painting), always in a state of searching,” Ofili said at the time.  

Recently, it’s been back on show back at Dovecot. The work, a mesmerizing swirl of floating, bleeding charcoal lines and translucent watercolor shadow play, draws its name from the title of the first volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It is a feat of “many hands, hearts and minds,” says Celia Joicey, director of Dovecot (and formerly Head of London’s Fashion and Textile Museum). More than 6,000 hours and 77 pounds of wool went into its making, requiring hundreds of creative decisions to be taken by the weavers on behalf of Ofili, “about color, what to amplify, what to take out, and how to play with the light,” explains Naomi Robertson, a master weaver and head of the studio.  

By interpreting rather than simply copying Ofili’s painting, Dovecot’s master weavers talent for infinitesimal attention to detail is on display. “We probably scrutinize an artist’s work in ways even the artist doesn’t,” says Robertson. “We really have to peer in and consider every mark that they’ve made and then decide how much we’ll make of all those incidental marks that happen. This is what makes it so interesting—every bit of wool we put in has to be considered.”  

Drawing on classical mythology and contemporary demi-gods, a love for the Italian soccer player Mario Balotelli (the inspiration for the bartender figure in the tapestry), and the culture of Trinidadian men keeping songbirds for competition, Ofili’s tapestry questions whether “the sweeter song is the song of the uncaged bird or the song of the caged bird, and what that really is asking about liberation and constraint and how they could potentially relate to being human,” he explains. It vibrates with the richness of Trinidad’s tropical hues, the feeling of the waterfall’s spray almost misting your face, the faint rumble of storm clouds in the distance, and the whimsy of a scene that could be equally played out in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.   

One of the greatest challenges in its fabrication was translating the fluidity of water. “I thought it would be funny to see if the weavers could actually weave water—so I found myself making the watercolor and trying to release the pigment even more, and almost giggling at the fact that it was almost impossible for them to achieve it,” says Ofili mischievously. The weavers’ solution was to blend every color in a mix of wool, cotton, linen, and viscose threads to help conjure the artist’s aqueous wash of color. “A shiny cotton in the mix helped bring light to the water,” says Robertson.  

Over 250 shades of yarn traversed jewel-like tones of emerald, aquamarine, citrine, and amethyst through to what the weavers call “ice cream” hues of lemon, apricot, rose, and lavender. “It has the feeling of being layered, almost like mixing paint, bringing the final piece a luminosity,” says Robertson. “Something happens creatively when human beings don’t exclude their soul and spirit in the making of something,” adds Ofili.

Dovecot’s focus is not only on tapestry; it celebrates all forms of textile art. Recent exhibitions have included large-scale screen-printed panels by Pauline Caulfield, and up next will be “Stitched: Scotland’s Embroidered Art,” curated in collaboration with the National Trust for Scotland. “This is a marvelous opportunity to really put women front and center as creators,” enthuses Joicey. During the summer, the British painter and printmaker Mark Hearld, who is known for his quirky, vibrant collages and linocuts inspired by nature, was Dovecot’s first artist in residence, spending time on the studio floor with the master weavers, dreaming up tapestry ideas for an exhibition to be held at The Scottish Gallery next year.  

The studio was used by Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri as an atelier ahead of the brand’s Cruise 2025 fashion show at Drummond Castle and Balenciaga once asked Dovecot to work with them on weaving silk tapestries to be used for jeans. For this year’s International Women’s Day, three innovative tapestries woven by Dovecot for contemporary artist Christine Borland were hung in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Medieval & Renaissance galleries. “We mix things up here in the hope to connect with people in a broader sense, trying to keep tapestry at the pinnacle of the art world,” says Joicey. Robertson agrees. “The skill and the method have not changed—we’re still hand weaving on the same looms with the same bobbins—but working with contemporary artists and modern fibers gives it a different point of view.”