Where Material and Imagination Meet

Hand-crafted textiles have a beguiling way of enchanting the artists who work with them. 

At least, that has been my experience as an artist working with weaving and dyeing over the past 15 years. To work with textiles by hand, to take them from raw plant or animal fibre to the level we witness in the realm of textile art requires numerous stages of processing requiring patience, time and dedicated labour. Nowhere do we witness this more ardently than in the processes of Dye and Resist as found in the Japanese textile practices of Kasuri weaving and Tsutsugaki, which I have been so fortunate to have experienced first hand working with masters of these crafts during visits to Japan. 

The painstakingly slow processes of Kasuri weaving and Tsutsugaki demand a level of commitment and devotion that is quite unfathomable at times and reveals a great deal about what we are capable of as humans engaged in tactile processes.– it’s a meeting point between material and imagination, that begins to feel like a kind of magic - through a deeper engagement with the alchemical and mathematical processes that lie within nature - and deep within ourselves.

Discovering the Pinnacle of Textiles in Berlin

I first encountered textiles as an art form whilst living in Berlin fifteen years ago, where I experienced seeing the Bauhaus tapestries of artists such as Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl. Witnessing the complexity and beauty of form meeting craft meeting material ignited a fascination and drive to work with them that I can only describe as utter possession. It set me on the path of discovery, and as the life of an artist often mysteriously works, the following year my path took me to visit Japan, and unveiled to me just how far textile accomplishment can go, when these nexuses of craft and art in material meet.

KASURI: A Microcosm Woven from Mathematical Precision

My eye has always sought out pattern, and in particular when pattern is found amidst the amorphous. Kasuri weaving takes this principle to an astonishing level. It is a resist-dye weaving technique, whereby warp and weft threads are resist-dyed methodically according to mathematically precise calculations to create patterns and images. Prior to dyeing, sections of the warp and weft yarns are tightly wrapped with thread to protect them from the dye. When woven together, the undyed areas interlace to form patterns. This ikat technique is thought to have entered Japan from India in the 13th century, and having taken hold of the imagination, flourished throughout the following centuries to develop into the Kasuri iteration, reaching levels of complexity in pattern and pictorial form unseen elsewhere. 

In 2019 I was awarded a QEST fellowship award to study Kasuri weaving at the Kawashima Textile School in Kyoto for a two week intensive course. This incredible course, taught by the Kasuri Sensei Emma Omote, was rigorously rewarding in the amount of knowledge we were given over the relatively short space of time. Alongside this, we were immersed into the history of the technique both in Japan and through other ikat disciplines globally, enabled through the resources of the course and via discussion with the other students from all over the world. Having this opportunity to deeply engage with this weaving process firsthand in the context of Kyoto with all its rich history of textile practice was such a gift that has enhanced the possibilities within my weaving based art practice.

Engaging with the Art of TSUTSUGAKI

Through my developing interest in the textiles of Japan over the years, a textile collaboration has emerged with Link Collective, an independent company that produces contemporary furoshiki designs for a worldwide audience. For a number of years I have been creating artwork for furoshiki - the traditional Japanese textile format of a multi-functional square piece of cloth, historically used to wrap clothes to transport to the bathhouses, and in more recent times to wrap gifts with. Each design I have made explored the functional portability and the nomadic qualities of these transportable cloths as subjective maps of various places that have held meaning for me personally.

In 2019 I was invited by Link Collective to create artwork for another traditional Japanese textile process - Tsutsugaki - literally meaning ‘tube drawing’, which uses a rice paste to act as a resist in combination with natural indigo dyeing, to create textile artworks. It was historically produced as wedding gifts in the form of bedspreads, and wall hangings, and also as ‘noren’ - curtains that act as inviting entranceways to spaces. I was delighted to accept this commission. As luck should have it, whilst visiting Japan to undertake my Kasuri weaving course, I was able to join Kyoko Bowskill of Link Collective on a production visit to the Nagata family Tsutsugaki workshop in Izumo, as part of my QEST research trip.

The Living Flame of Tradition in Izumo: Witnessing “Japanese Craftsmanship” at Nagata Dyeing Factory

The Nagata Dye Factory lies in the outskirts of Izumo, along the Takase river, and is the last remaining Tsutsugaki factory to be found in Japan. Arriving at the workshop that morning in May, we were greeted warmly by Mr Shigenobu Osada Nagata and his son Masao Nagata, as well as their friendly dog Beck and led to an inviting corner of their workshop. The entirety of the space was adorned with their craftsmanship - wall hangings, furoshiki, banners, table cloths and more. Over Japanese tea for the next hour Kyoko and the father-son duo discussed in Japanese the intricacies of the technique, the current state of the industry of Japanese craft textiles, the tools, their customers, as well as the rich culture of Izumo. Now in its fifth generation, we were shown work from his ancestors from the Meiji period, a baby blanket of exquisite detail, fortuitous cranes and turtles under a sunset cloud, and a bed spread of family crests, sewn together from four pieces, still luminously rich with indigo, despite the passing centuries.

We were then guided through the process through a series of demonstrations. I spotted my artwork draped in mid air above our heads, and another half of the noren was retrieved and suspended in the upper part of their studio in order for Mr Nagata senior to demonstrate the application of the design, the ‘tubedrawing’. He filled his tube tool with the paste, and began to ‘paint’ on my design that had already been marked out in pencil, sucking on the tube every few minutes to release air bubbles. He sat with repose on the tatami mat in the morning light, attentively applying the resist paste to the cloth. After completing a section, he would throw on some rice husks and dust them across the work, to help seal in the paste to the fabric.

We were then led to the dyeing room which contained six vats of indigo dye sunken into the ground, the wooden vats and their surrounds held the patina of countless years of dyeing. This room was his son’s domain and we watched attentively as he carefully submerged one of the pre-prepared halves of the noren design into one of the vats. After a few minutes, he delicately lifted the cloth out of the vat with a skillful manoeuvre borne out of years of practice which ensured no drips would deoxidise the anoxic liquid. With audible awe we then witnessed the metamorphosis of the cloth oxidising, turning from a turquoise green to an intense sky blue . 

Seeing my designs undergo the entire Tsutsugaki method, what struck me was how gentle this process seemed. Rice paste, rice husks, paper tubes with a metal tip, indigo vats with only fermented natural indigo and nothing else added -  the large fabric swathes are then taken out to the canal just outside the workshop, tied to a pole in the middle of the gushing river, and the rivers flow washes the natural indigo away with a little help from Mr Nagata junior to beat away the remaining rice paste. It takes at least 10 dips, each having to dry for hours in-between dips, then carefully washed, dried, ironed, then sewn by Mrs Nagata on site.

After warm good-byes, bows and the trading of business cards, we were kindly driven to the local Shussai pottery, and adjoining cafe where we tucked into the most delicious curry before heading back east on the Shinkansen bullet train to Kyoto. We left with a feeling of deep gratitude for experiencing and even collaborating with such dedicated craftspeople of a process developed and maintained over centuries.

The Power of Textiles: Re-weaving Our Connection to the World

In a world that increasingly divorces us from processes of making and strips away the humanity inherent within our relationship to materials worked by our own hands, the existence of these dye and resist textiles process do just that - they resist erasure, they ringfence the human from industrial logic, they enmesh us in relation with the living world that lies within the material world (this includes us) which in turn leads us a deeper enchantment with it - and that’s why I keep coming back to textiles.