Image / Alun Callender / Cockpit Arts
The very thought of a hand-operated wooden loom conjours up images of Rumpelstilskin’s woven gold, a rather fitting analogy for the treasured textiles Catarina Riccabona weaves. Born out of a desire to work with her hands, Catarina’s hand-woven pieces are as beautiful as they are sustainable, and feel astonishingly soft: true heirloom quality. Below, Catarina shares with us her continual journey to be 100% sustainable (and the difficulties that come with it), the processes which inspire her creativity and her thoughts on a ‘well made life’.
Image / Yuki Sugiura
Please can you introduce your work and what it means to you?
My name is Catarina Riccabona, I am a hand-weaver, I mainly make one-off interior pieces, like throws, blankets, bedspreads, cushions, bath mats etc. I weave bespoke commissions for private clients and interior designers and occasionally work on collaborations, most recently with lighting designer Claire Norcross on the “Loom Light“.
Can you share a little about your background before you started your own business?
I originally did a degree in Translation Studies in Vienna. This brought me to London for my first proper job. Working in a multi-lingual team my role was to edit and update information for a travel industry publication. At first this was new and exciting but fairly soon I started feeling bored and pretty stifled with the routine of a 9-5 job, spending most of my day sitting at a desk staring at a computer. At the same time I noticed a growing interest and desire to do something creative and work with my hands. I eventually went back to uni here in London. Inspired by friends who I lived with at the time I did a foundation course at Chelsea College of Art and subsequently a BA in Textile Design at Central Saint Martins. There I discovered my fascination with the weave process.
Image / Yuki Sugiura
Tell me about what inspires your creative process…
Hand-weaving is quite a structured activity. There are at least six different physical processes required before you can actually start to weave. I feel that this set-up gives me some structure that guides me into my “creative zone”, like a slow and considered approach. At the weaving stage I tend to work quite spontaneously and am often inspired by the materials I work with. I love the tactile quality, the fact that I can hold and feel my raw material directly. I usually start by laying out different yarns on the table. I add or take away colour, look again and like this edit and compose my palette for a particular piece or a series of pieces. And then during weaving it’s most exciting for me to observe how the chosen yarns appear in the woven cloth – that’s when I start to manipulate them by applying different weave structures. Weft colours can be accentuated, masked, transformed depending on how I make them interlink with the warp.
Image / Yuki Sugiura
What is your favourite part of the weaving process and why?
There are different stages involved in creating a woven piece and they can all be enjoyable or tedious – it really depends on your mood and the state of mind you’re in on a given day. For instance, often I don’t mind threading the loom even though it’s very slow and you have to be able to concentrate for a long time on something rather boring. But I’m always glad at that stage because it means that a more physically demanding job is already done – winding the entire warp on to the back beam of the loom under even tension. This is my least favourite part. The best bit comes when all the preparatory work is done and I’m ready to weave.
Image / Alun Callender / Cockpit Arts
When we met, we chatted about sustainability. Please can you share how you are endeavouring to make Catarina Riccabona as sustainable as possible? And what challenges do you face whilst doing so?
The most frustrating challenge is probably the fact that there is no easy single answer to making my products sustainable and eco-friendly. It is a complex subject and requires on-going research. I have put a few decisions in place for creating my work, mostly to do with choosing or avoiding certain yarns. I work with linen, hemp, wool, alpaca and second-hand or recycled yarns. Where possible I try to use undyed yarns to avoid or minimise the use of chemicals and waste of water in the yarn processing. For colour I sometimes use plant-dyed wool. My favourite supplier for this is a woman in Finland who grows all the ingredients in her own garden and dyes small batches of local rare breed wool by hand. Every time her results differ slightly and I just love these subtle nuances! Another source of colour for me can be recycled linen. I buy it from a UK supplier who collects industrial surplus and left-overs to re-spin that into new yarn. The colours are what they are, depending on what is available at a given time. Yet another way of introducing colour is by collecting “waste warp” from weave colleagues. At the end of every weave project when a weaver cuts the work off the loom there is about one meter of warp that cannot be woven and usually goes to waste. These are hundreds of individual lengths of yarn which I collect and knot back together to form a continuous string that can then be used in the weft.
Image / Alun Callender / Cockpit Arts
What does ‘A Well Made Life’ mean to you?
A well made life for me has to do with achieving balance and the notion of being able to spend my time in a meaningful way. Making a living from what I do is not always easy (and I am working on that balance!), but I’m always happy whenever I remember when I wake up how special it really is that I have a studio in London, that I’m about to go there to work on my loom, be creative, that I get to spend my time in that way.
Interview by Verity Inett
workshop@holbornmag.com
This is part of a series of articles profiling makers from Cockpit Arts Studios in Holborn & Deptford. Keep your eye out for more here.