Harold Cohen studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London. By the mid-1960s he had established himself as an abstract painter with an international reputation, representing Britain at the Venice and Paris Biennales.

Over All was commissioned by the V&A in 1966; the Museum had previously acquired a large rug mural designed by Cohen for the British Government's Pavilion at the Milan Triennale of 1964. The merge of colours in the background is evocative of Cohen's early work but proved difficult to achieve on the loom. Cohen believed that weavers had to be involved in the design process from the earliest stage in order to understand and interpret the design and he developed a unique collaborative relationship with the Edinburgh Tapestry Company's weavers. Cohen understood that a woven textile can 'never look like paint ... for weaving is not a mere reproductive process'. This innovative approach produced one of the workshop's finest tapestries.

A year or so after this tapestry was produced, Cohen took up a post as visiting professor at the University of California at San Diego, where he began to experiment with computers. Some of his earliest computer-assisted works from this period are also in the V&A's collections. In the 1970s, Cohen went on to develop AARON, a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to create machine drawings based upon the artist's accumulated knowledge and experience.