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A brightly coloured abstract tapestry was recently hung in the quiet nave of St David’s Church, Llangeview, Monmouthshire. Created by British artist Andrew Bick, Compendium (Tree) is a striking textile work made in collaboration with rug specialists Odabashian and Hales Gallery and was first presented in partnership with Art + Christianity. Installed within this historic 18th-century interior as part of a curated project by Jacquiline Creswell, the piece brings together geometry, symbolism and craft in a setting far removed from the conventional white-walled gallery.

Compendium (Tree) marks Bick’s first work in tapestry – a shift from his usual painted and constructed surfaces. Developed over several months, the piece translates one of his intricate abstract drawings into hand-woven wool and silk. The artist worked closely with Odabashian’s team to adapt his layered composition into textile form, introducing shimmering threadwork and subtle shifts in texture to replicate the nuances of pencil lines and translucent washes. The piece was hand-woven on a Gobelin loom in the Hubei province of China by craftswomen trained in this technique on looms imported from France in the 1970s.
The final piece, measuring just under two metres tall, balances sharp geometry with a sense of quiet movement. Blocks of colour sit above a gently gridded backdrop, lending the work a spatial tension that changes as the viewer moves. Indeed, there is a wonderful interplay between the hard-edged nature of the composition and organic elements, which the tapestry truly brings to the forefront. 

The piece's structure draws on several conceptual frameworks. A sequence of tapering lines evokes the shape of a tree, echoing numerical models used by artists like Paul Klee, while Fibonacci-based proportions inform the rhythm of the forms. These underlying systems, long present in Bick’s practice, are never simply decorative. They provide visual exploration scaffolding, prompting viewers to decode and contemplate.

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