Souffleur, what is tufting?

SOUFFLEUR

Tufting

Like all domains, art has its own vocabulary. In 'Souffleur', employees of M explain and give background to professional terms that may sound familiar to you, but of which you may not know, or no longer know, exactly what they mean.

Marie Decoodt, exhibition coordinator for Contemporary Art: "Tufting comes from the English tuft, literally: 'bunch' or 'pick'. It is a technique for making wool carpets, but also for example for making artificial turf. You start with a undercloth or the primary backing. You prick the yarn through the back of the undercloth. You can do this with a hollow needle, or with a tufting gun or tufting machine. Then you pull the needle back and make the next hole, right next to the previous one. This will give you a lot of loops at the top of the carpet. These are then secured with a second cloth, the secondary backing. At the end, the loops are trimmed at the top. The end result is a carpet with raised threads. Cutting can be done at different heights - hence the difference between high-pile and low-pile carpet. 'Pole' is another name for yarn."

"Tufting is often thought to be a recent technique, but it is in fact inspired by an ancient craft method of making bedspreads. Because production costs were low, tufting began to supplant traditional carpet weaving from the 1950s, first in the US and then in Western Europe."

"At M, Kato Six is exhibiting six tufted carpets she made especially for her solo exhibition. In each carpet, you will recognise a curl pattern. This is a reference to the carpet beaters of braided reeds that people used for beating dust out of carpets and blankets. Kato derives that form – as so often is the case in her work – from collective memory. She tells us about this in an interview elsewhere in this issue."