Ptolemy Mann on colour, weaving, and painting.

Material Matters with Grant Gibson

Ptolemy Mann is a British artist who came to widespread attention with her woven textile pieces, often stretched across a frame and notable for her extraordinary use of colour.

More recently, her practice shifted and she has turned to painting on paper with fascinating – and inevitably colourful – results. Her latest pieces combine the two, as she paints on her hand-woven artworks.

Ptolemy is hard to avoid at the moment. Currently, she has a show of paintings at the Union Club in London’s Soho. During May, there will also be a solo exhibition with Taste Contemporary at Cromwell Place and her first monograph is published by Hurtwood that same month.

In this episode we talk about: why the time is right for her first book; her fascination with colour; being told she was a ‘terrible’ painter as a student; taking up weaving and her love of the craft’s restrictions; learning to stand up for her ideas; unexpectedly creating products for John Lewis; picking up a paint brush again; how the realisation she wasn’t going to have children changed her practice; why her new works are ‘an act of anarchy’; and growing up with her ‘bohemian’ father.
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