Looking Back: Return of the Weaver

From July 1954

New day for church fabrics and furnishings?

During the Assembly this year, one end of the Rainy Hall was occupied and enlivened by an exhibition of tapestries, wall-hangings, pulpit falls and carpets designed for use in ecclesiastical buildings – whether churches or church halls. The richness of their colour, and the liveliness of their design must have made many of us think with egret of the dull, commercial aridity that afflicts so much of the interior decoration of our churches.

Although the artist and weaver, Mr R. Macdonald Scott of Melrose, is already well-known as a maker of hand-woven rugs and carpets, this was the first opportunity that there has been of seeing a collection of his ecclesiastical work. Here were the pictures of the great glowing yellow carpet that he wove last year for the chancel of Glasgow Cathedral (a piece of work that has been called ‘one of the finest examples of the weaver’s craft in existence’). Here was the cartoon for the resplendent heraldic banner of the Dean of the Thistle, woven to hang above his chair in the High Kirk of St Giles and placed in position there in time for the Coronation visit of Her Majesty the Queen; here too was the sketch for the tapestry of St Bride commissioned for the chapel of the Deaconesses’ Home in Greenhill Gardens; and here were suggestions and designs in profusion for tapestries and pulpit falls, carpets and frontals of a beauty and individuality that ought to provoke us into looking more critically at our prevalent bits of listless plush and gold.

The simplest form of redecoration

But, for those off us who have not yet seen the Glasgow carpet or the St Giles banner in situ, the cartoons could provide no more than a mere suggestion of the richness of the colour of the one, and the intricacy and fineness in weaving in the heraldic red, yellow green, black and gold of the other. Only a visit to the two Cathedral Churches can show us their full beauty, and everyone who is interested in the contribution of the modern artist and craftsman to the Church should make a point of paying one.

But apart from these large commissions Ms Scott has also done work for ordinary parish churches, notably in his own town of Melrose, where the chancel and chapel steps of St Cuthbert’s are covered with a green carpet of his weaving (illustrated in the exhibition by the cartoon for the finished work); and where in High Cross a large tapestry of the Burning Bush (lent by the church for this exhibition) placed behind the pulpit against plain white-washed walls has completely transformed one of the less pleasing churches of the Borders into one of the most pleasant – an object lesson in the possibilities of this kind of decoration for the ‘difficult’ churches of last century, that congregations bent on redecoration, so often find it impossible to do anything with but repaint and revarnish. In addition to these, Mr Scott designs and weaves pulpit falls, one of which – of a Paschal lamb on a ground of coral and blue – was outstanding in this exhibition in the Rainy Hall.

An exhibition of this kind is heartening  to those of us who are concerned with or about the level of taste shown in our churches. It is good to think that an artist of Mr Scott’s calibre is being used by at least some of our churches.

E.M.H

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