Unique Industrial Property | Scottish Borders
Further to Inventors of Tradition I, Atelier E.B. and Panel launch a new book, exploring connections between art, architecture, and checking back in with a textile design tradition extraordinary to Scotland. An arts curatorial practice, Panel commissioned an essay by Rebecca Wober on Womersley and Klein, describing High Sunderland and the Studio.
Womersley buildings in the Scottish Borders are representing the 20th Century buildings celebrated in the 2014 Venice Biennale, as showcased on the Creative Scotland website.
It’s wonderful to hear that Dovecot Studios have been planning a major exhibition of Bernat Klein’s tapestries to be on show for the 2015 Edinburgh Art Festival. I can’t wait to see these. Bernat Klein invigorated the Borders woollen mill industry from the 1950s onwards and I find his life story fascinating. Born in Yugoslavia and travelled to study and work in the UK, via Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem, he refashioned the rolling hills of the Scottish Borders as in international port of call for the Parisian fashion houses who were hot for his slubby wools in vibrant colours, with his trademark velvet thread woven through the fabric. He did not stop at textiles for the garment industry but crossed borders into tapestry, ceramics and even paint.
After a good 10 years spent researching the work of Peter Womersley across the UK and in Hong Kong I am thrilled to say that I finally been lucky enough to visit High Sunderland, near Selkirk. One of the many joys of the visit was to spot a working model of its neighbouring Womersley building, the Klein Studio, as a scale model made in balsa wood. I would say that it is very unusual for this kind of model to have been preserved so well over this time, and it is just one sign of how much the client’s family cherish the collaboration between client and architect. A whole book awaits in fleshing out this theme…
I was thrilled to be asked to write an article on Peter Womersley’s house for the late textile designer, Bernat Klein, at High Sunderland. This piece was commissioned by Panel for their Inventors of Tradition II exhibition at the Palace of Art, Bellahouston Park where the work of Atelier EB was on show. Of course it was impossible not to write about the Klein Studio in the same breath, and this was the first Womersley building I ever saw, whilst rounding the corner of a quite Borders B-road one damp spring twilight. I loved it that people were actually reading my work, at an opening as well! It was fabulously illustrated with photomontages by Kim O’Neil, styled by Beca Lipscombe which did so much to set the scene.
