‘With Macrogauzes you are two completely different people – when you are working out the design on paper you are using your aesthetic sense, sense of proportion and so on. When you are making it, you are an engineer – you have to be absolutely sure the tension is correct. So after acting as an artist to design the drawing you become a technician to make it as perfect as possible’ – PETER COLLINGWOOD

Peter Collingwood (1922 –2008) is widely recognised as one of the world’s most important weavers. A teacher, scholar and significant collector of culturally and historically important textiles, his work is held in museum collections globally. His innovative, elegant Macrogauze wall hangings represent a key chapter in a celebrated career.

Whilst working in Jordan as a surgeon with the Red Cross, Collingwood began collecting Bedouin textiles in order to understand their making and structure, constructing his own loom on which to teach himself. On his return to the UK, he retrained with the celebrated weaver Ethel Mairet in Ditchling, followed by work with Barbara Sawyer in London and Alistair Morton at Edinburgh Weavers.

In 1953, Collingwood set up his own studio in Archway, London, where his rugs and other works were acquired by leading design outlets and galleries including Liberty, Heals, and Primavera Gallery. He attracted a burgeoning following from figures including potter Lucie Rie, architect Frederick Gibberd, furniture designer Robin Day, and Jack Pritchard of Isokon. In 1958, after being invited to live and work at Digswell House, a set of residential studios in Hertfordshire, he undertook major commissions for clients such as Gordon Russell, and for the modern interiors of Shell Tower and New Zealand House.

Collingwood’s international recognition grew following an invitation to lecture in the United States in 1962, leading to annual trips and an increased demand for his work abroad. In 1968, he published The Techniques of Rug Weaving, which has remained in print ever since, becoming known as the ‘hand weaver’s bible’. Collingwood pioneered the processes of ‘shaft-switching’, ‘sprang’ and ‘ply-splitting’. ‘All along my weaving has depended on finding and exploiting new techniques’.

Collingwood’s Macrogauze wall hangings fused economy of production with design elegance. They broke away from traditional weaving, in which vertical warp threads cross horizontal weft, to instead envisage a warp that could move at angles from the vertical to cross, separate, twist and merge. Using specially constructed looms and multiple rigid heddles, he invented a new weaving language that emphasised structure and geometric form.

The Macrogauze construction lent itself well to a level of modularity and adaptation of scale. Whilst the width of the loom was restrictive, Collingwood created bespoke designs of individual length to be hung in series – and architects and interior designers commissioned one-off works for banks, embassies, public buildings and private homes across the world.

Over a 30 year period Collingwood created more than 250 Macrogauze wall hangings pushing the technical boundaries of weaving to new levels of complexity and competence. His enduring legacy lies not only in these extraordinary, technically rigorous works, but also in wider weaving achievements and his commitment to writing and teaching. His career bridges traditional craft and modernist innovation, and the Macrogauze wall hangings remain a unique contribution to textile history; testimony to a mind equally compelled by design elegance, structure and invention.

A selection of Macrogauze wall hangings will form the content of the Margaret Howell Calendar 2026.

In agreement with Jason and Rachel Collingwood, a limited edition of 150 gicleé prints are also available to buy.

This exhibition and calendar were made possible through the generous support and loans from private collectors, Crafts Council and Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts. With thanks also to Jason and Rachel Collingwood.