‘I’ve always had a physical response to colour’

The Coach House conversation: textile artist Margo Selby

Colour is personal. It evokes emotions, tinges our memories and casts a filter over our feelings (perhaps rosy, maybe a jaundiced yellow). It’s a subject I explored in my post Colouring Your World, part of the Sensory Week here on The Coach House in May. And it’s this connection between colour and mood that drew me to artist Margo Selby.

Margo conjures colour. For her, it’s more than a visual medium – her handwoven artworks move and dance in their juxtapositions of hue and pattern (she plays techno music while she threads her loom to get into the flow). They are sculptural, the threads creating shapes that cast light and shade across the surface of each piece. They even ‘breathe’ – her art installation Breathing Colour, currently on show at Blackburn Cathedral, swoops and sighs like an extended exhalation across the vaulted space.

But most of all, for her, colour feels.

When I speak to Margo over Zoom, she is seated at her kitchen table, a red wall behind her (‘My husband chose it. I wasn’t sure at first but I love it now,’ she laughs). I’ve asked her to tell me more about her love of colour, how she visualises it and the joy it brings to her life. But also to tell me about the creation of Breathing Colour, which translates memories into hues, then maps them onto a printed fabric.

‘Love affairs, dodgem rides, football teams and pets are represented here; the stuff of life coded into colour swatches and printed side by side, so each singular story joins the narrative of a community’

The piece was created in collaboration with fabric printing business Standfast & Barracks, whose 160 employees contributed their memory and colour associations for the piece as part of the company’s centennial celebrations. Back in the studio, Margo says, she and her team couldn’t help but become invested in the stories being told and how, by sharing their recollections, the project created bonds within the factory. Here’s our conversation…