Thank you for letting us see this lovely piece - from Michael Frances's Textile Gallery. I can imagine that he gave an entertaining explanation of the design (he always does), whereby I have trouble seeing birds, and, of course, “embroidery” is incorrect, but in 1975, Marla Mallett had not yet taught us all about weaving techniques.
As Pamela describes the piece: balanced but not symmetrical. That is art. Symmetrical is easy, but, as mentioned a couple of places above, suspicious, if a piece is claimed to be older. We know that weavers used existing items as a model. Nothing wrong with that, especially if the iconography was more significant than we can understand. When reproducing a design, however, the natural inclination is to “correct” apparent discrepancies to “improve” the balance by increasing symmetry.
For me, therefore, the lack of symmetry suggests that the piece was a first-off effort without a direct prototype.
I find it intriguing to put myself in the position of the weaver, seeing only the white warps as she envisions what she wants to weave. Assuming that 2/3 of the left border are cut off by the edge of the photo, she starts quite symmetrically, but then the diagonals go their ways, and she wants different things on the backs of her quadrupeds, which seems to upset the beginnings of what follows. She is an artist, however, so that is no problem; she can achieve balance without symmetry, as we now appreciate.
She is not only an artist but also a master of her handicraft, filling the background with all those little hooks and with unerring consistency dotting the blue areas with little rhomboids. This is probably second nature, a necessity to avoid too long floats, but could one of us do it?
Then, for whatever reason, the “hull” of the ship is offset to the left, perhaps because the diagonals leading up to it are both slanted to the left. From what was already woven, they had to be parallel. Had she already anticipated this, balancing it with the dark rhomboid on the right and the additional diagonal there? The broader vertical from the hull on that side certainly does. But she now has space to fill on the right, starting a new vertical border, which is only countered by a zigzag line on the other side.
In my theory, these are the types of things that would be “corrected” by a weaver using this piece as a model.
Could she have anticipated that she was going to hang it on the vertical from the ship? Did her iconography call for that? (Have we seen that elsewhere?) On the right, she starts an additional pendant. Because she feels the need for more “weight on that side?
One would like to test the accuracy of her balancing of the blue areas on the column that “supports” the ship - point on point, as if to tempt the viewer to appreciate her skill. Is it a ship - balanced on a column? Someone with more experience will have to tell if s/he has seen that before.
On a much lighter note, any dealer worth his salt, would explain that the beasts at the bottom are dinosaurs and an absolute sign of the prehistoric origins of the design.
Thank you for (or apologies for) your suffering through my long-winded appreciation of Ann's tampan.
Larry