In 1996, when the Japanese were commissioning the world’s foremost textile artists to decorate the new cultural centre in Kiryu (a city with a long textile history, especially in silk weaving), they picked Peter Collingwood, along with Japan’s own Junichi Arai and the American Sheila Hicks. Collingwood was a natural choice because it was hard to think of another art weaver and loom technician who could have coped with what they had in mind.

The commission was for a dramatic, three-dimensional, 16ft by 26ft wall-hanging for a key position against a huge concrete wall in the middle of the new cultural centre’s entrance hall. The material from which it was to be woven was a heavy and, in most people’s hands, unyielding stainless-steel yarn that had never before been used for any artwork on this scale, and Collingwood needed all his legendary technical prowess to handle it. A complicating factor was the fierce deadline: the yarn would not arrive at Collingwood’s workshop in Suffolk until January 27, 1997, and the official opening in Japan was to be on May 11.

Collingwood was already in his mid-seventies, but hard work, experimenting and inventing were still second nature to him, and, with only a few sleepless nights, he achieved the seemingly impossible, amply justifying the faith that the Japanese had in him.

The dazzling piece of art that resulted called on his reserves of determination but also on all his skills of improvisation. When he realised, for example, that he needed an extra roller for his loom, he took an aluminium scaffolding pole left behind by the BBC after filming the final part of its The Craft of the Weaver series in his workshop 15 years previously. He plugged its ends with pared-down bobbin centres, made a pair of angle brackets, screwed them to the top of the knee bar and fixed roller axles in them. He, like his mentor, Alastair Morton, was a technician as well as a master craftsman.

Peter Collingwood was born in London in 1922. His father, a professor of physiology, died when he was 12. A dextrous boy, Collingwood followed his father into medicine and qualified as a doctor in 1946. He encountered his first loom in an occupational therapy department while serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps — and he was hooked. He knew nothing of weaving itself, but the loom interested him as a machine and inspired him to improvise his own out of two deckchairs and to weave woollen scarves on it in quiet moments in the back of any handy RAMC ambulance.

After nine months working with Arab refugees in Transjordan for the Red Cross (he was, he said, “bowled over by the country and the people, especially the Beduin and their weaving”), he set about getting himself trained as a weaver, initially with one of the most eminent weavers of her day, Ethel Mairet, at Ditchling, in Sussex.

“It was the first time I had met somebody who you’d now say was weaving art fabrics,” he told Handwoven magazine in 1988. “She had an aesthetic approach to weaving and she wasn’t just mechanically throwing shuttles and beating up the weft. Ethel Mairet had a very good eye for colour, texture and quality.”

He then trained with Barbara Sawyer in Putney and, in 1952, Alastair Morton in the Lake District. “Alastair would plan a sample warp, its yarn, and its threading, then leave it to me,” he wrote. “I could then alter treadles, weft colours, thicknesses, do anything I liked. I really enjoyed this journey of discovery, searching for what was inherent in the warp, not realising what a novel way of running a workshop this was.”

In 1953 he set up his own workshop in London, concentrating on weaving 3ft by 5ft rugs at the rate of three a week on a second-hand four-poster, eight-shaft, double countermarch loom — Morton having told him “things a countermarch loom could do which at first I just did not believe”. As he told Handwoven magazine: “I could make a rug in two days if I limited myself to shuttle-thrown designs, and loom-controlled patterns. I abandoned traditional ways of making rugs because I needed the speed to survive. The most important thing to me was not to be a failure at weaving.”

Heal’s, Liberty and Primavera were among his early customers. From 1954 onwards he also taught at a number of London art schools, and in 1962 he began annual teaching visits to the US. In 1958 he moved to Digswell House in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, where the Digswell Arts Trust — created by the educationist Henry Morris — made flats with studios available at low rents to artists and craftsmen of whom Morris approved. It was here that Collingwood met his wife, Elizabeth, and they married in 1962. As the trust’s first weaver, Collingwood made the acquaintance there of the trust’s first potter, Hans Coper, with whom he was later to exhibit. It was also at Digswell House that he began to specialise in what he called macrogauzes, innovative, open-structured wallhangings with twisted and crossed threads in intricate patterns, woven on a new type of loom, developed by him, which freed the warp from the necessity of lying parallel to the selvage. With macrogauzes, as with his other work, it was the technique that came first, not the design. His designs, dramatic rather than pretty, exploited whatever the technique could offer him.

He went from Digswell in 1964 to his final workshop, in Nayland, Suffolk, where his son, Jason Collingwood, was to join him as a weaver in the 1980s. There he expanded his weaving repertoire to include shaft switching (a Collingwood invention for which he devised a time-saving lever platform) and the sprang technique, in which large hangings were produced in thick jute on special frames designed and made by him on a primitive jig.

Most commissions were for domestic pieces, but in his latter years he also worked on many large rugs and hangings for public places, including his pièce-de-résistance, the macrogauze for the new cultural centre in Kiryu, Japan, in 1997. The Kiryu piece used a newly invented two-ply yarn consisting of 6,000 micro-filaments of stainless steel, made by a factory whose normal output was the wire for radial car tyres. “It looked like silk until you handled it, then its weight said metal,” Collingwood wrote with feeling. He chose it in three colours: the natural grey, a golden brown and a dark brown with a touch of aubergine.