Spring 1883 Melbourne Art Fair
During Spring1883 Art Fair the gallery has the pleasure of presenting a monumental tufted tapestry, a collaborative work between Roger Mortimer and Jess Swney.
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 of 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