Queen’s birthday honours: dreamtime weaver Antonia Syme creates a tapestry of collaboration

Antonia Syme has made a career of bringing together people from different artistic disciplines in creative collaborations.

Antonia Syme, director of the Australian Tapestry Workshop. Picture: Daniel Pockett

Just as weavers work with many colourful yarns to produce a tapestry, so Antonia Syme has made a career of bringing together people from different artistic disciplines in creative collaborations.

Ms Syme is the director of the Australian Tapestry Workshop in Melbourne, which has produced tapestries for embassies, private homes and public institutions, ­including the Great Hall at Parliament House in Canberra.

In her 11 years at the ATW, Ms Syme has broadened the range of artistic collaborators there to ­include musicians, designers and architects. She has been honoured for her work by being made a Member of the Order of Australia.

“What fascinates me is the ­collaborative process between the artists and weavers to create the final artwork,” she said. “In the past few years, other artists have become fascinated by the medium. The sense of collaboration keeps rippling out into other artforms, and it’s really beautiful.”

The workshop has seven part-time weavers who have been able to continue their work during the COVID-19 lockdown with modifications in the studio. One of their projects on the loom is a design by artist Janet Laurence, a commission for the home of Sydney arts patrons Andrew and Cathy Cameron. The other piece is a design by indigenous north Queensland artist Naomi Hobson for the Australian embassy in Jakarta.

Several ATW tapestries hang in Australian missions worldwide through the Embassy Tapestry Collection, which Ms Syme ­described as a visually beautiful ­aspect of cultural diplomacy.

She has encouraged artists from other disciplines to become involved in tapestry, through ­musical collaborations with composer and soprano Deborah Cheetham, and through the Tapestry Design Prize for Architects.

Weavers at the ATW work with Australian wool yarns that are dyed on the premises, producing 370 different colours.

“The weavers are just extraordinarily skilled at their mixing of colour,” Ms Syme said. “Then there’s the exciting dialogue with the artist, or architect or designer, about the best way to collectively move forward in realising the ­design in tapestry form.”

Ms Syme previously worked in conservation and maritime ­archaeology, a role that took her on expeditions to shipwrecks in Kenya, Madagascar and Thailand.

“To me it’s all part of the same wonderful cultural heritage, making it and preserving it,” she said.

“I feel very privileged.”