Loom with a view

Vinca Brown - weaver of colours. It’s all about colour, taking an ancient craft and giving it a modern twist.
www.loomiereweaves.co.uk/products

“I can’t imagine how I would’ve gone through the last ten years without having Dungeness. The place, the atmosphere, the people, everything together.”

Please give us an overview of your early career.

Vinca.  I was born in Headcorn in Kent, spent the first 18 years of my life there, and went to school in Tenterden at Homewood. We spent our weekends in Dungeness, Rye and Winchelsea.

When I was 18, I went to Northumberland College of Art to study TV and video production, which led to working in Soho as an editor for six years. Then I co-founded and co-run a post-production company in Soho for another 12 years.

Then I had my first son Otto; I was torn between raising him and editing full time. Also, my husband Oliver is a cameraman, so he was often away. So I eventually decided to give up Soho and became a freelance editor working from home.

Around this time, I did a two-hour weaving course with a friend just for fun, and I enjoyed it. We passed a shuttle backwards and forwards and maybe changed the colours; it felt relaxing and meditative. So I decided to do a weekend course with a weaver in Clerkenwell. It was supposed to be a course for four people. However, I was the only one that turned up, so I had excellent one-to-one teaching. After that, I decided I wanted to get into it more; at that stage, it was more of a hobby. So I started a course in Finsbury Park one morning a week at The Handweavers Studio.

I did that until lockdown; by that stage, I’d already bought a table loom that I had at home. I just weaved my way through the lockdown. It was such a nice thing to do in between homeschooling. It just gave me something to focus on, and production snowballed. So I set up a website, started selling things through that and shared images of what I was doing through Instagram. Then in 2021, I did my first South East Open Studio, which was the first time I sold directly to the public.

“When you weave, a lot of it is technical and very mathematical. So there are a lot of similarities between editing and weaving; they are both very numbers based and repetitive at times. I think that suits my brain.”

When setting up a loom, you have to think in numbers the whole time, and if you’ve got the numbers wrong, you have to start again. You have to be very focused when you’re setting it up. And then, when you start the weaving process, you can kind of drift off a bit.

My mum was running a bed and breakfast in Lydd. So we used to come back to the area quite a bit. Oliver suggested getting a place in Dungeness 12 years ago, and we started looking for a property the next day. We looked at a few that weren’t right for us; then, an estate agent mentioned we’ve got this other one. It’s just come on the market; it’s not been advertised yet. So we went to look at the place; it was falling apart, and the windows were hanging out. There was no bath or shower; it was only cold water. The sinks drained into buckets, and you had to empty them before they overflowed. But it had a train carriage. So we looked at it and said we’ve got to do this. Our family thought we were mad. There is something about the space and the view at Dungeness.

At that time, Otto was 18 months and just after we saw the place, he died suddenly. So Dungeness has helped us through that whole process; it has been our therapy in a way. And I feel like most people in Dungeness have been drawn there for a reason. So we spent time there ripping up carpets and pulling nails out of the carriage; it was kind of our therapy. We took our anger and frustration out on the place in a cathartic way.

My dad is an architect, so he helped us design the house, and we knocked down what was there, kept the carriage, moved it around 180 degrees and built what we have now. The house is one train carriage with a bit of addition on one end, plus a wagon which is my studio.

Dungeness gives you that time and space. You have such an open sky to look at. Every time you look the environment has changed. The atmosphere is different; the light is different. The light’s amazing down there. You have time to think and put things into perspective, a lot like weaving.

When I started weaving, I became aware that other people perceived it as a bit of a boring hobby. A craft for the older ladies. With muted colours, browns and greys. I wanted to bring that idea and what I do up to date with colour. The colour is as important to me as the weaving, if not more important. Colour can be an extension of how you feel within yourself. Bright colours make you feel brighter.

I want to make something that friends and people of my generation would like to buy and bring the craft back into the modern day. So for my scarves, I buy the yarn from independent hand dyers in the UK. I am guided by their colour palettes, which they change constantly. I only ever make two scarves of the same colour combination. So they’re pretty unique. My scarves are mainly merino; I’ve recently made some more summery scarves, which are made with mulberry silk and nettle.

How did you decide to set up your studio in a wagon?

Vinca.  Oliver loves finding unusual things, the wagon came from Ashford via eBay. It was previously a motorbike mechanic shed. When we got it, it had posters of motorbikes inside and smelt of oil. It travelled on a low loader from Ashford, and we put it in the garden in Dungeness. Oliver thought it would be his shed, but I had other ideas for it. So he put a new roof on it. Inside, it’s wood-panelled and all original and amazing; we gave it a good wash, sanded, and oiled it.

When the weather allows, and the elements are right, I use it as my studio, but I can’t use it all year round just because it’s too open to the wind and rain. So I set it up for certain days of the year when my studio is open to the public or when I do South East Open Studios. Other times I weave in the house or back in London.

I’ve just bought a floor loom, which means I can weave much wider fabrics, which I’ll be able to make into other things, like more significant framed pieces and cushions. So I’ve been framing pieces, rather than just like a woven wall hanging, and I’ve been experimenting with some seaweed yarn to link back to Dungeness.

I find most of my equipment secondhand; you can buy table looms, brand new. But I prefer working on a vintage loom. So modern looms have nylon heddles which you use to thread the yarn through. The ones I use are metal; even that changes the process for me because they make a different sound. Also, I feel like they’ve got stories to tell; I think about the other women that have used them, the yarn that’s gone through them. Everything from Loomiere Weaves has been through my hands many times. I started with a table loom because they are portable, and I can move them around wherever I want to work.

“When making a scarf, the yarn passes through my fingers many times before the scarf is finished. It is things like that in the process that are so tactile. I love it.”

My colours are almost as influenced by graffiti in Hackney Wick as they are by what I find on the beach in Dungeness. I think it is a really nice contrast to have the two. In general, it’s incredible to have the difference between the two places.

Are editing and film still part of your life?

Vinca.  Yes, so I’m an editor, my husband is a director of photography and Johnny Phillips, also in Dungeness, is a director and actor. Johnny wanted to make this film based on The Dong with a Luminous Nose, an Edward Lear poem. We shot it three years ago, the summer before the first lockdown. So there is the Dong and then these, these other characters called the Jumblies. So all the Jumblies are children that live within the Dungeness area, including my second son, Ansel. So it’s like very much a community-spirited film. Johnny and I cut it together before lockdown, and the rest of the post-production we did remotely while in lockdown. Tilda Swinton did the narration; she has connections to Dungeness, Derek Jarman and Johnny. It has just premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival and at Raindance Film Festival in London. We had a screening at Kino Rye and Kino Bermondsey and outside on the beach; with this guy who came with his inflatable cinema screen. It is called the Rebel Reel Cine Club. Now our film is doing the rounds. That is just one example of a community project that happens down there.

In the film, the Jumblies arrive on a boat, and then they leave by boat, and you don’t really know what happens to them. So it’s topical with what’s happening at Dungeness with the migrant boats coming over. When we were filming, people weren’t talking about migrants as much; by the time we edited it, it was really in people’s minds and in the news. I remember the first time I watched it with Johnny; it sent goosebumps down my arms because that was what was happening in the sea. The first time you see migrants arrive on the beach, it takes your breath away.

Here in Dungeness, we socialise much more than we would in London, and everything is much more spontaneous. If someone lit their fire pit, they’d invite others round to join them for a drink. There’s always someone around for a cup of tea; you just knock on their door. People are drawn to Dungeness; most people have a story behind why they ended up there. They are born there, part of the fishing families, or they’ve been drawn there for whatever reason. The community is affected emotionally by things that are so different to your average communities, like the migrant boats. It’s humbling to see, and it puts your life into perspective.

And it is an incredible environment; you see amazing blue sky, or it can be hammering it down, sometimes horizontally, and that still has the same effect on you. So you are this tiny thing in this amazing big world; it is a fantastic place to put your life into perspective.

Vinca Brown  |  Loomiere Weaves
Instagram
www.loomiereweaves.co.uk