Biography
Peter Collingwood (b. Marylebone, London 1922 - d. Nayland, Essex, UK 2008) was initially educated at Epsom college, Surrey, and St Mary's Hospital in medicine but during his National Service in Jordan he followed his vocation for weaving, making his own loom out of two deckchairs and produced scarves for officers' wives on it. He was also gifted a Bedouin tent-hanging, which remained a treasured possession. On his return to England, he spent six months at Ditchling, East Sussex, in the workshop of Ethel Mairet, then the best-known weaver in Britain, followed by work for two other prominent weavers, Barbara Sawyer and Alastair Morton, the latter of whom went on to become the artistic director of Edinburgh Weavers, before setting up his own workshop in Archway, North London on 1952. He sold his rugs to shops like Liberty and Heal's and also exhibited with the Red Rose Guild and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society.
He taught at Hammersmith, Camberwell and Central art schools and in 1958 the educationist Henry Morris invited Collingwood to be one of the first fellows at his newly-established Digswell Arts Trust in Hertfordshire. There he met the potter Hans Coper, with whom he was to have a joint exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1969. Commissions for large works for Shell and BP followed and he was able to buy an old school at Nayland, near Colchester in Essex, in 1964, which he converted into a home and studio. He was awared an OBE in 1974.
As well as contributing articles for the Journal of the Association of Guilds of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers, Collingwood wrote several books including Techniques of Rug Weaving (1968) and The Maker's Hand (1988), in which he analyses 100 woven structures from around the world.
His designs incorporated innovative techniques, includiung his Macrogauze wall hangings, that permitted warps to cross each other and even move sideways and were extended into 3D structures, culminating in his vast 2m by 4.5m hanging for the Performing Arts Centre, Kiryu, Japan, in 1997, woven with a new Japanese stainless steel yarn and weighing 100kg.
