Master weaver visits Council Chamber
2010-11-04
SEEING the tapestries in Drakenstein Municipality’s Council Chambers, brought back memories for Waltraud Hindlov, about the challenges she encountered during the weaving of the panels 36 years ago. Hindlov, the woman responsible for the three dimensional multi-medium mural tapestry (mural) in the Drakenstein Municipality’s Council Chambers, visited the Municipality recently. She was commissioned in 1974, together with Essy Greenwood, to weage huge tapestry panels for the newly built Civic Centre in Paarl. Altogether there were 145 square metres of tapestry, of which 96 metres were woven by Waltraud Hindlov and Gunel Hicks, the daughter of Essy Greenwood (an architect who designed the tapestries for the Civic Centre in Paarl). The mural is completely integral with the concrete wall of the Council Chambers. The tapestry serves three purposes, to be decorative, as an acoustic requirement to absorb sound suitable for the human voice as well as symbolic of the Paarl surrounds. The aim of integrating the chosen media of concrete, textile and painted walls have led to the superimposition of two design elements with the overall theme of the Western Cape landscape and the smaller grid patterns that have created shuttering panels of the concrete wall. Due to the fact that Hindlov stayed in Pretoria and Essy Greenwood near Stellenbosch, the communication and organising of the yarns used in the tapestries proved to be quite a challenge for them, therefore Waltraud had to take into consideration the damp air in the Cape, which has caused the woven panels to stretch. Due to the design, the woven panels had to be completed with the correct measurements and Walraud’s expertise proved to be invaluable. Because of the huge size of this project, Lynda Brother was recruited to weave for Essy Greenwood. The tapestries took one to two years extra to complete due to unforeseen leakages in the roof of the new Civic Centre and the tapestries were hanged as well as inaugurated at the end of February 1978. Hindlov arrived in South Africa in 1956 and started to work for Empisal selling rooms, where she provided weaving instructions for customers, and then she worked at Hillmond weavers in Brakpan. She met and married Stig, her Swedish husband, and they moved to Pretoria, where Waltraud learned weaving at the technical college as well as giving private lessons. She is the only weaver of the original three who is still alive - she turned 89 in October. It was an immense pleasure for her when she was received by the Mayor of Drakenstein Municipality, Councillor Charmaine Manuel recently. Seeing the tapestries again brought back memories of the challenges she encountered during the weaving of the Council Chambers panels.
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