Jess Swney Roger Mortimer

Low Shores in Diaphanous Folds, 2025

Hand Tufted Wool on Monks Cloth, Framed

1800 x 1650mm

 

It begins as a dream pressed into fibre. Its power

lies in how it holds attention by asking the viewer

to dwell, to consider, to speculate. It is a map

across uncertain ground. In the hands of Roger

Mortimer and Jess Swney, mapping becomes a

collaborative act, a weaving of structure and

softness, precision and intuition. It is a cartography

of wonder.

 

The work appears first as a myth remembered

through thread, its forms familiar yet elusive, like a

coastline glimpsed from above or a memory

half-recalled. It resists the logic imperial

cartography: there is no legend, no working

compass rose, only scattered symbols--stars,

arrows, fractured geometries. In one corner, a

checkerboard burst gestures toward orientation

but is playfully distorted, quietly undoing the

authority it mimics.

 

This tufted tapestry, the size of a king bed, folds

the language of marine maps into the tactile

intimacy of textile. What Mortimer and Swney

chart is more than coastline; it is intuition, memory,

emotion and a cartography of feeling, made for

those willing to navigate without certainty.

 

- Dina Jezdic