Weaving Residency at Argo Arts, Athens

Argo Arts - Weaving Residency in Athens taught by contemporary weaver Rachna Garodia
June 2026

This June I joined contemporary weaver Rachna Garodia at Argo Arts - a creative residency programme and project space in Athens - to learn weaving, textile and basketry techniques over a 10 day course. Rachna's wonderful teaching encouraged and enabled myself and my fellow student, curator Loulou Kokkedee, to play and experiment with bringing these new techniques into our own practice with excitement and curiosity. 

Walking the streets of Athens between the residency and the studio, I noticed red and white barrier tape knotted through mulberry and orange street trees, demarcating access and non-access, temporarily zoning how pedestrians and cars flow through the city: markets coming and going, roadworks piling shards of marble near ancient ruins, warnings and routes for various reasons. The use of the street trees to create this fleeting wayfinding was interesting too - the plastic tape stretched taut through spindly branches and serrated leaves, black mulberries squashed into the gridded marble tiles underneath. Opposites surfaced: order and chaos; synthetic and organic; temporal and permanent; assembled and growing; human and nature. 

This barrier tape is an existing motif in my practice, originally emerging from my project M/others in the Institution for the University of Bristol, where I invited mothers to wrap parts of the university building in this tape to identify access needs for parents and children. We later made collages in this material and I created a lanyard edition  MUMMY / mummy (2024 - 25) using the same red and white striped pattern to speak to the access issues around parenting and work. Bringing external, urban imagery internally within the institution connected themes of the visibility of parents in the public and private realms and the different 'hats' we wear at work and home. 

The tape therefore stayed with me in Athens, and I experimented with weaving it like a textile thread into a wire warp, creating a mesh-like malleable structure with long red/white tails which blew in the breeze of a fan - again blending an outdoor/indoor environment. I also wove the motif on a frame loom using cotton and recycled plastic, making diagonal patterns and a slipped checkerboard design which I later saw on Ancient Greek pottery - a design connection across generations. I wrapped shards of marble found on the street in it - an act of care, repair and binding temporality and permanence.

I created a photography series of the taut tape between street trees, honing in on the connection between tree, tape and knot - evidence of the human hand, quick fingers between leaves. The simple knot appeared again in a wonderful talk by Dr Stella Spantidaki on Greek Bronze Age textiles - microscopy images of a 0.5mm knot of woven flax - evidence of a fine linen hand woven by accomplished humans over 3700 years ago. I wonder about the future layers of the city: shreds of red and white on top of ruptured marble and concrete fragments, open to interpretation by curious minds thousands of years from now. 

Works:

1. Flow, 2026
Barrier tape, paper covered wire, linen (fan)

2. Meandering, 2026
Weaving with cotton, linen, plastic, barrier tape

3. Domestic, 2026
Found manufactured lace blind, metal bra pieces, cotton thread

4. Fragments, 2026
Found marble, found barrier tape

5. Untitled (Basketry experiments 01 and 02), 2026
Synthetic rope, hemp rope

6. Taut (series), 2026
Digital photography on paper

7. Poem (and handmade zine of photographs)

Meandering, Ellie Shipman, 2026

Political oranges,
Bitter but beautiful. 
Parakeets and pigeons,
(A very London contrast).

Graffiti on marble,
Cheaper than wood.
Extraordinary remnants,
Pushed aside for gold.

Red and white tension,
Knots serrated mulberries.
Hipsters out, in and out,
Every thread meanders.