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