I always remember Matt’s smile. It hasn’t changed since he first projected it in my direction in 1983, when we both wrote for London’s Artscribe (a magazine with a high percentage of writers who were artists). He later went on to edit it brilliantly, getting it into colour and attracting a global readership and a dynamic stable of international writers. I’m meeting him and Emma Biggs, his partner in art and in life, at the Australian Tapestry Workshop (ATW), in South Melbourne. I spot them across a studio full of weavers, all waiting for the panel discussion on the newly-completed Biggs & Collings tapestry. I squeeze through the crowd and take a seat beside them. And there it is again, forty years later, that same smile. It radiates enthusiasm and curiosity in equal measure.
“Tell me about this tapestry,” I ask them, before they take the stage with Sophie Travers, the newly appointed Director of ATW, alongside the two senior weavers who lead the team. “Who commissioned it?” I continue, awestruck by the size of the tapestry, fumbling to get my phone to record. “It’s huge! Where is it going from here?”
“The artist Keith Tyson commissioned it,” Matt began. “And it’s called . Keith won the Turner Prize in 2002, and the year before had been in the international pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His earlier. In 2017 he married Liz Murdoch, granddaughter of Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. Keith knew me from the artworld, and he’d been buying my drawings.”
