Red Thread Studio: Slow Cloth, New Cloth, Art Cloth

African Textiles Coming to Metropolitan

African textiles are hotter than July right now, for good reason -- what an amazing and rich textile heritage, a treasure trove of color, pattern and symbolic inspiration. A new exhibition of traditional and contemporary African textiles will open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 30 and run through March 29, 2009. From the Met's press release:

Africa's extraordinary legacy of textile arts, with its explosive color and complex graphic statements, will be presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art beginning September 30. Bringing together more than 40 works dating from the early 19th century to the present – including a spectacular silk and cotton kente prestige cloth woven in Ghana during the 19th century and a 30-foot-long installation work by the contemporary artist Yinka Shonibare – The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design without End will highlight the enduring significance of textiles as a major form of aesthetic expression across the continent. While examining some of the finest and earliest preserved examples of different regional textile traditions, the exhibition will relate these to contemporary works by eight living artists, who draw inspiration from textiles in their explorations of other media ranging from sculpture, painting, and photography, to video and installation art.

This is a key dimension of the spirit of Slow Cloth for me --  illuminating traditional textile techniques and viewing them through the lens of contemporary artists and designers. This exhibition will surely be visually and culturally dramatic and powerful -- I predict we'll see its influence on fashion and textile design, on color forecasting, and in the art world.

Circles of Cloth: More Virtual Textile Travel

I have travel on my mind . . . especially places near water. Here's a dream trip: The Textile Society of America is having its annual symposium in Hawaii in September this year, and the theme is textiles as cultural expression. This sounds like a fascinating event, probably well worth figuring out a way to go.

Other temptations: The Maiwa workshops, and the Organic Exchange conference in Portugal in October for the organic cotton industry.

And if nothing else -- though it's mostly been a homebound year so far, except in my mind, there is a chance that I could go to Brazil  in the fall to speak about sustainable textiles and apparel. I was lucky to go for the first time a few years ago to attend an organic and sustainable products conference there that's run by some wonderful people, and we stay in touch to this day. The conference that year was in Rio de Janeiro, a city of great wealth and beauty alongside great poverty; like most magical places, it's a little dangerous and very seductive.

At Bangles & Clay, a blog that's part of a nonprofit organization called Nest, there's a post about Coopa-Roca, a sewing cooperative in Rio founded by Maria-Teresa Leal (the English-language Web site for Coopa-Roca itself is here). Leal founded the cooperative as a way to utilize the sewing skills of women living in the profound poverty of one of Rio's worst favelas and create decent work opportunities for women raising families in violent slums. Now the clothes of Coopa-Roca are seen all over the world, and despite many challenges, it's been a success story in the midst of all-too-common despair in these neighborhoods.

There are stories like this in many places, and room and need for many more. Each one is different and unique, and each one comes down to a chance for people to celebrate their textile and craft heritage and skills, often at risk of being lost, and to have work and fair pay.

The Coopa-Roca women use recycled garments and fabrics and traditional knitting, crochet and patchwork techniques, including yo-yos -- fuxicos in Portuguese. I love seeing the resurgence of yo-yos -- like many children, learning to make a yo-yo was one of my first sewing lessons. And I love that it connects me to women and children worlds away through something as simple as a needle, thread and a circle of cloth.

Quilts of Soul, Strength and Scarcity

I saw the exhibition Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt at the Denver Art Museum yesterday. This is not the same exhibition of quilts that appeared in 2003 at the Whitney Museum, inspiring critic Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times to call them "some of the most miraculous works of modern art that America has produced." Those quilts have since appeared on postage stamps, among other things, and made the Gee's Bend quilting style famous. But the quilters, the spirit and the story are the same.

It's the story that makes these works astounding. From an artistic viewpoint, they are all visually arresting; some are more successful than others. A few quilts are incredibly dynamic, with colors and shapes making an inventive, harmonious whole enhanced by the raw stitching, exposed knots and uneven binding that reveal the maker's hand. Some are more jarring. Most quilt artists today would probably attempt to develop more refined techniques, unless they were self-consciously trying to imitate this style.

But these women, until recently, were not aiming to be quilt artists, selling in galleries and exhibiting in museums, and could hardly imagine that possibility. They were trying to inject some creative salvation into the task of keeping their families warm in lives of the most abject poverty in this great but sometimes unjust country.

The town of Gee's Bend is isolated on three sides by the Alabama River, with limited access on the fourth side. Its residents are African-American, descended from slaves, and historically subjected to every injustice thereof --  a ferry service was shut down in 1962 to prevent the townspeople from registering to vote, not resuming until two years ago, and education and opportunity was minimal at best. In Wilcox County today, almost half of children under 18 live below the poverty line.

The characteristic Gee's Bend quilting style emerged and evolved in this insulated community, passed down through the generations. The quilts are made from used clothes and fabrics, many using a simple Housetop or partial Log Cabin block, others with a more random structure. Fabric pieces tend to be large, or as large as repurposed used clothing (or corduroy scraps from Sears, Roebuck & Co.) would allow, and few of the quilts are squared off; some have binding on one or two sides only; the quilting stitches follow crooked, curved or bending lines and the stitches are big by quilting standards. They were made quickly to be used quickly, for warmth in unheated rooms. Yet the women took the time and had the spirit and imagination to make creative choices, often dramatic and unexpected and playful.

To see these quilts on the walls of an elegant museum gave me some cognitive dissonance, because they reverberate with this story of scarcity few of us could overcome, and strength that most of us would be hard-pressed to find; it's in every stitch. This story is in many patchwork quilts, but it is especially poignant here. It's also a story of joy and creativity and the deep relations that have held this community together.

Today, thankfully, many of the Gee's Bend quilters have benefited from the popularity of the quilts, though there have been some lawsuits regarding payments, intellectual property rights and licensing agreements. I was moved by the story of one woman who stopped quilting for 20 years because of illness and depression, overcome by a life harder than I can imagine. When the Gee's Bend quilts were "discovered" and began to sell and return some benefits to the women, her despondency also began to life, and she was able to stitch again.

A book on display at the exhibition said that she had prayed all her life that her last years would be her best years. She felt that her prayers had been answered.

Stitching Worlds Together

My notion of Slow Cloth was always meant to include both individual artists and commercial or artisan companies working with textiles in authentic ways. I've mentioned companies like John Robshaw Textiles, Peruvian Connection, ABC Carpet and Home, Indigo Handloom and others. Today (via the wonderful Sri Threads textile gallery Web site) I came across KasuriHome, owned by artist and designer Catalina Arocena.

KasuriHome uses vintage Japanese textiles to make throws, quilts and pillows. These aren't made from showy fashion kimono but mostly from "everyday" kimono and fabrics. Each item is unique and will not even necessarily conform to standard sizes, but is created to maintain the integrity of the textiles used. Some quilts include hand stitching done by professional Amish quilters, as this one does:

Others are machine-quilted and simply showcase beautifully combined fabrics:

These quilts are one-of-a-kind artisan objects that are not inexpensive . . . in the words of what I call "shopping journalism" that is so prevalent on the Web these days, they are aspirational. But for those of us who simply love textiles, they are inspirational.

I have multiple textile personalities these days, equally enchanted looking at these vintage/recycled/wabi-sabi pieces in the Japanese or Gee's Bend or Alabama Chanin spirit, and by rich, dazzling, mirror-laden, beaded and bejeweled, gold-and-silver-embroidered pieces with the spirit and colors of India or Morocco . . . and those are just some of so many amazing textile cultures. Whichever way you go on any given day, there is a rich universe of color, texture, soul, spirit and beauty, with thousands of years of humans putting worlds together stitch by stitch, to guide us.

All Ebb, No Flow

I had a friend who described me as someone who wakes up every day ready to engage in hand-to-hand combat with her demons. This week Team Demon is a little ahead -- not by much, and not for long, but I feel like I'm moving through water these days. All the doors have closed, but there are no windows opening and it's getting hot in here. You've been there, I'm sure.

So you try everything -- pushing the river, surrendering to the river, being joyful though you've considered all the facts, as Wendell Berry said. You do your work and yoga and meditation and dance and more work and creating and reaching out and therapy and sending resumes and reading oh-so-helpful books and eating right and thinking positive and good grief, where is the fun? The excitement? The buzz? The magic? The prize? The romance? The passion? It's all overdue.

But this helps. I will snap out of it and return to the mantra -- our topic. And speaking of overdue, I headed back to the library to return the book on living complaint-free because someone else had it on hold -- and clearly I didn't finish the book -- but I found something less pious and much more interesting: another gorgeous Thames & Hudson textile book. Quilting, Patchwork & Applique: A World Guide is far more than the title or cover suggests. I almost passed it by, thinking it would focus on traditional patchwork quilts, but it is really a comprehensive survey of global textile techniques and culture. There are hundreds of  beautiful color illustrations of garments, household textiles, ceremonial and ritual textiles, recycled-fabric patchwork, embroidery from India, Asia, Europe, Africa -- it's encyclopedic and stunning, and full of inspiration.

The book is recent, published just last fall, so it has a very current sensibility in the text. She mentions the Gee's Bend quilts -- I'm going to see the exhibition on Saturday. I wonder how it will be to see them after seeing so many images of them, and hearing the story for so long in the media.

Armchair Textile Travels on Sunday Morning

Acey of Sparkling Lotus-Land and Nichobella has written a wonderful review of African Textiles by John Gillow. This book looks magnificent . . . it's expensive but not all that much more than a tank of gas these days, even in my 17-year-old Honda, and will certainly last longer and inspire more. After reading her review I realized that a book I'd checked out from the library last week, called Traditional Indian Textiles, was also by John Gillow. He seems to have a new book forthcoming on Indian textiles as well.

John Gillow is a true global textile explorer (John, wherever you are, do you need an assistant?) and has an incredibly wide-ranging fascination for history, culture and aesthetics seen through the textile lens. As more and more textile traditions are lost, research like his becomes more important.

If Indian textiles interest you, I also recommend Tradition and Beyond: Handmade Indian Textiles, which seems to be more available now. I found my copy at a local store that stocks used and unusual new books, and I'm so glad I bought it. It too was a splurge at the time, but I've never regretted having it for even an instant.

This blog by photographer Claude Renault has a wealth of beautiful photographs of India, and you'll get a feel for the color palette and human emotion of the country seen through an artist's eye.

It's amazing how rich with pattern and color and design the world is. These treasuries of pattern and color in India and Africa contrast quite a bit with the book I'm reading on the Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic, where colors are subdued, pattern is very subtle, and restful space is paramount.

And if you'd like some world music to go with your textile journey, I've been listening to the beautiful Rise by Anoushka Shankar, Ravi Shankar's daughter. The music is rooted in traditional Indian structures, yet modern and eclectic in its sensibility and very accessible to Western listeners. The song Beloved is transcendent.

photograph of Indian textile by Celeste Goulding.

Even Here We Are: Some Thoughts on Beauty

It's a beautiful flower in your garden
But the most beautiful by far
Is the one growing wild in the garbage dump
Even here
Even here we are.
 -- Even Here We Are, Paul Westerberg

Out of all those kinds of people
You've got a face with a view.
        -- This Must Be The Place, Talking Heads

I've been trying to do my Qualities of Slow Cloth series in order (as in the original post) though it really doesn't matter -- the order was not carefully thought out. But there we have it, and the next quality up for exploration is beauty. Writing about beauty, and what it means in the context of textile art, craft and culture, is -- ha! -- not easy. This might just be one of many posts exploring it. So, let's just call this some thoughts on beauty.

The art world gets snobbish about beauty sometimes, as if to make art that delights the eye is weak and insipid and somehow easier. It's true that beauty sometimes feels less intellectually challenging, because it bypasses the brain to just arrest the senses. To sidetrack the argument, we can talk about an aesthetic. To me an aesthetic is more a personal sense of what is beautiful, and an intention to move toward it, while beauty often suggests a conventional standard that isn't what we're aiming for here.

Our perception of beauty is relative. They say that homely people grow more beautiful with intimacy, while the conventionally beautiful, if lacking other compelling gifts, lose their luster in the eyes of others with time. If meaning, significance and memory grow, people become more beautiful in our eyes. The same is true with some objects -- worn patchwork scrap quilts come to mind. And we're at our human, artisan best when we create something and use our hands and imaginations and hearts to make it not just purposeful, but also beautiful in a way that is true to our own aesthetic. This is true for words, too -- there are words whose only purpose is to identify or communicate something, but when we add some elegance or rhythm to what we say, it serves a larger need. It's not what you say, it's how you say it . . .

And because we are so compelled to make things more beautiful than necessary, and we have been all through the ages in every culture, I have to believe that it's in our collective DNA to seek and to create beauty. It nourishes us and it connects us to spirit -- some of the most beautiful things made by humans are tributes to spirit in some form: magnificent cathedrals, awesome statues of Buddha, gardens, art.

In her wonderful book A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman talks about how researchers have tried to codify what makes a stranger's face appear beautiful to us. There is a certain symmetry that we respond to, and it can be measured in some pretty nuanced ways. But of course, we all know that we love the faces we love for their uniqueness and their "flaws" as much or more than for their perfection.

So it is with everything.  The Japanese call this recognition of character wabi-sabi -- humble and imperfect beauty. I've just checked out Robyn Griggs Lawrence's book The Wabi-Sabi House: The Japanese Art of Imperfect Beauty, from my (beautiful) local library. I'll let you know what I learn.

Until then, food for thought: Where does beauty fit in your work? What's the most beautiful thing you own, or the most beautiful thing in your life, and what makes it so? What's the most beautiful thing you've made, and how do you feel about it? Do you feel pressured by conventional ideas of beauty, in your life and person and in your art or craft? Comments welcome.

Monday Monday

Every once in a while I come across a site that I'm sure I must be the last to discover, but just in case, I'm going to tell you about it anyway: Fiber Arts Calls for Entry is just what it says, a fantastic aggregate of opportunities for textile artists.

Via Fibercopia, I found One World Textiles. My Australian readers may know this site already. I would say that this is eye candy for global textile lovers, but on a long walk this morning through a glorious green landscape under blue sky, I decided that "eye candy" isn't really an appropriate term for things that are really eye and soul nourishment. That's what these textiles are -- every thread has a soul, indeed. And check out the book list -- more than a hundred great recommendations on global textiles. It's sending me to the library.

We've had thunderstorms and windstorms in the past couple of weeks -- with a couple of four- and five-hour power outages (inevitably right after buying a refrigerator full of groceries). It's made me acutely aware of how dependent I am on electricity. So what can you do when there's no computer, sewing machine, stove, iron, radio or CD player? Why, hand stitching, of course. I began some bead embroidery yesterday -- something I really go in phases with, and find deeply meditative and healing when the time is right.

A quick follow-up on the colonoscopy: It's so not bad. If it's on your list, do it. I'm telling you, if they marketed it as a Total Spa Cleanse with Brief Induced Nap, they'd have no problem at all getting people there. I felt great the next day.

Every Thread Has a Soul, and the Dance of Art and Nature

An article in the new issue of Selvedge quotes an Arab proverb: "Every thread has a soul." Awesome. I think I'll make that my official tag line for this blog, and maybe even its new name. In Googling it, I don't find any other references to this proverb, but maybe it's little-known in the West with origins in the mists of time, and that totally works for me.

I joined Stitchin' Fingers, Sharon B's terrific new fiber arts community. Anyone can join, and there are many sub-groups forming to cover just about every technique or interest. I keep thinking about starting a Slow Cloth group and/or a global textiles group . . . anyone interested?

I've also been thinking about, and wanting to do a post about various kinds of eco-art -- the intersection of art and the environment (I've written about art and agriculture on my other blog).  Nature and art are inextricably intertwined, of course, and nature has provided us with inspiration from the dawn of humankind. Making art from unprocessed natural materials or integrating art and natural spaces, a la the brilliant Andy Goldsworthy, is one kind of eco-art. There are many ways that fiber artists are connected to this sphere; after all, until recently, all fiber came from plants. Just a couple of links to explore:

• Abigail Doan is a mixed media and environmental artist who works with fiber. Her work is extremely intuitive on one hand, and the way she uses threads and fibers in nature makes emotional sense, yet it's also challenging work with an intellectual and ethical context.
• Though I've not personally worked with natural dyes, this is a place where art and nature do an intimate dance. As mentioned in my previous post, Permacouture is exploring this area; Cheryl Kolander at Aurora Silk and others have also been pioneers.
• Nicole Dextras is a Vancouver artist -- take a look at her Weedrobes series.
• Lots of people have blogged about the World Beach Project and the radical Crocheted Coral Reef project, but the links are worth repeating if you've not discovered them yet (you're in for a treat).

I think all the renewed interest in the arts of spinning and felting is related to the environmental movement. We've finally figured out that food comes from the soil and the farm -- now we're beginning to understand where fabric comes from, too. The closer we get to that understanding, the more people want to work with fiber in its raw form. Fiber is as ancient and as intrinsic to community as food. And making it beautiful and meaningful connects us to soul and spirit, and to each other.

And now, with all this talk of ethereal and natural things, I must get my body to the yoga mat. Go find some inspiration in nature today, and create.

photo by Streuwerk.

Time Waits for No One

My father used to call me "Miss-elaine-eous" and I must have been eleven or twelve years old before I realized that he was making a play on the word "miscellaneous." So here are my MissElaineous offerings for today . . .

• The Maiwa Textile Workshops for 2008 are up, and they look completely inspiring. Workshops are 2-3 days; the schedule begins in September and goes through early November, so there are a lot of opportunities to find your way to Vancouver. I'd love to take the blockprinting workshop and The Expressive Stitch. Well, really, I'd love to take almost all of them.
• Have I written yet about Permacouture Institute here? This is a new nonprofit organization with a very creative and activist sustainable textile and Slow Cloth orientation. I spoke by phone with founder and executive director Sasha Duerr today -- this woman is amazing and will make some positive waves in the textile world, I'm sure of that. She's an expert on natural dyeing and has a special interest in edible dye plants (cabbage, beets, onions, etc.) and all the possibilities inherent in being able to grow things that will both feed us and color our fiber without harm to the environment. We talked about her work and about some of my ideas for taking the Slow Cloth concept to new levels. . . . everything is possible, right?
• I've been meaning to link to a blog post by UK biologist and textile artist Mags Ramsay on The Character of Cloth. I love the work she's doing with indigenous African textiles -- very beautiful and with a great "spirit cloth" sensibility.

That's what I've got today. Off topic, this week has been a continuation of a pretty intense and unrelenting healing journey -- I've been prescribed physical therapy for my neck, and Monday was the first visit. I wasn't quite prepared for the tremendous amount of grief and sadness stored in that area that the bodywork released. Though in practical terms the therapy is necessary for some dental work to be successful, on another level it's evidently part of a lot of ongoing work I'm doing on old emotional issues - according to Dr. Christiane Northrup, at 50 all of your unfinished business from childhood MUST be resolved if you're to stay healthy, and it will rear up like an immovable elephant in the room if you don't. I'm finding that to be all too true, and it turns out my unfinished business is a doozy.

Finally, I have a colonoscopy scheduled on Friday as the follow-up to March's illness. I tell you this not to give you Too Much Information, but to encourage you to get this test if you are around 50, and not be embarrassed or put it off. I know, I don't feel old enough for it either. On the inside, I'm about 16 -- rebellious, darkly romantic and trying to figure out what to be when I grow up. But on the outside, time waits for no one (or Tom Waits for No One, as we fans say) and we must attend to our bodies. We are all of the nature to age, as the Buddhists say, even if 50 is the new 30. I hope the procedure will be as dignified and painless as possible.

And hey, where are the Fiber Artists for Obama? They seem to have let their blog go dormant. They ought to be celebrating today. Fiber art in the White House! I'm sad for the way Hillary has sometimes been treated, and  proud of her for the most part despite some missteps. But we do need a change, and no one has set a fire in young voters like Obama has since Bobby Kennedy, and I'm all for that (I was and still am a John Edwards fan, too, and I truly hope there's a place for him in Obama's cabinet after a November victory). Like me, this country has a lot of healing to do -- the old ways just aren't working.

I hope you, cherished readers and all who find their way here, are also healing from anything that ails you. Onward we go.