You’re all invited ! but I don’t expect to see too many of you here next sunday when Petra Eberl and I are showing our latest works in an all day exhibition. It will be open from 2pm to midnight – a marathon – and it’s sure to be hot. The theory is that as our rental begins from 8-30am, we will be there on the dot to get my 8-10 quilts hung, lighting positioned, her domed plinths in place and everything else set up in 4-4/12 hours, before going home to change and appear all fresh and breezy to greet our first visitors ! Petra’s wonderful handmade 18ct jewellery can be seen on her website, www.petraeberl.com The invitation design was a joint effort; I am not sure who came up with the notion of sewing gold stitching across (the ends are left hanging free, but don’t show in this pic) but it seemed like the perfect ‘fusion’ of our very different works of art. We had 1000 printed, and it took about 12 hours and about 500m (half onew of those big Aus$18 cones of gold thread to sew the wavy lines across each one. The wastage, less than 5%, was smaller than I feared. Of course, if you make a mistake on paper the needle holes are there, period. But many of the false starts were worth re-doing, and I got pretty skilled and quick at retracing my steps and going over each hole again. The most common reason for needing to do this was the occasional thread problem, either snapping or suddenly bunching up underneath. A few however were not retrievable, but it was a better result than I feared even though I had practised and done samples for different effects on other cards before I received the printed ones. I took a few invites to friends in Aus – the common reaction was ‘wow’.
Dear reader, I am just back from a 2-week trip to Australia, aware that I have not posted in a while -but my internet time was short and infrequent. En route I had to lay over in Frankfurt Germany for about 36 hours. I went prepared for it to be cold – and my goodness was it cold !, Much of the time it was on the verge of snowing and did so just a few minutes after an obliging fellow tourist took this snap of me on one of the bridges over the river Main (LL) All of a sudden we were almost in whiteout, well, blurred-out, anyway, and the hard little balls made soft crisp sounds as they landed on my jacket and the leaves (LR)
Despite the freezing cold I took my hands out of my gloves to snap these stele (UL & UR) in the grounds of the ethnological museum which was my destination. These fabulous. fascoinating objects are from, um, I think it was Ethiopia. I couldn’t read the German well enough to give you a clear accurate description, but to me they say something spiritual with some watching or guardian function. Although you may think otherwise, I really took the photo because of their incised markings: the same primal patterns of groups of lines and other small marks that appear in lots of other places and objects from around the world.
I enjoyed my full day there as the flight to Singapore didn’t leave until almost midnight, so I had a lot of walking around time, which was good in between long haul flights. An art museum in central Frankfurt was showing Moreau, Turner and Hugo and the rise of abstract impressionism, a very interesting exhibition which I thoroughly enjoyed. I visited several other museums and galleries, learned a bit about the ancient history of the city from the earliest times to the present, and found time to do a little unscheduled shopping there, but found nothing of note specifically textile related despite asking around.
Ah – spring – and nothing like a fresh garland of garlic. I just bought this one from a vendor who came to the gate a few minutes ago. Why would anyone here in Montevideo buy powdered garlic or crushed in a jar (with preservatives) when the wonderful fresh stuff can be had, so beautifully presented, and in such quantity for about US $8-50 ?
We always have one hanging on the back of the kitchen door. I will give at least half of this one away – we can’t get through all this, even though we eat a lot of it, there’s still a bit of the previous one, seriously drying out now, from the same guy 6 months ago. Of course in addition to imparting wonderful flavour, fresh garlic wards off colds and the dreaded grippe, they say. We know it wards off anyone else too, if you have been eating a lot of it!
So –this is today’s textile note – click on the image to get closer to the wonderfully plaited leaves that hold the whole thing together.
Ceramic bowl repaired using the Japanese kintsugi technique.
When this ceramic bowl broke, instead of being discarded, it was beautifully repaired using an adhesive or lacquer infused with powdered gold. This repair technique is Japanese, and known as ‘kintsugi’. The break lines are highlighted rather than camouflaged, serving to demonstrate the bowl’s importance to its owner. The changed appearance becomes part of it’s history as a functional object. I didn’t learn of kintsugi until some years after I posted about a wonderful exhibition Mike and I saw in Paris in 2007, at the Musee du Quai Branly. Rewording a bit, I’m going to write about Objets Blesses: la reparacion en afrique again here – because it made a huge impact on me. Unforgettable.
The title of the exhibition translates literally as “injured objects” which of course they were: they were broken and then repaired. On show were artifacts collected in several African countries by French colonists, traders, missionaries and explorers. Made from many different materials – wood, iron, precious metals, ceramic, leather, stone – every object in the exhibition had been repaired. None of the objects blesses were repaired using the kintsugi approach of course, but the array of repair techniques was fascinating – apart from images of pieces in the exhibition here on this page I found a wonderful Pinterest board here that I’ve been following for a while.
An impressive array of techniques were used in these repairs, and despite the mending process changing each object’s appearance, these repairs had all restored usefulness of these valued household tools and vessels, weapons, and religious and ceremonial objects symbolising community offices and powers.
Really interesting ridge pattern formed by repair work becomes an additional surface design.
My grandparents survived the Great Depression, where millions of people lost everything suddenly or gradually, and had to mend, make do or go without. Our parents lived with severe shortages and rationing of everything during World War 2. Inevitably, we baby-boomers were ingrained with the values of mending and making do, wearing something out before throwing it out. Thrift was necessary and virtuous. Today, with over 7.5billion people needing, expecting or requiring stuff, all imposing huge stresses on the Earth’s resources, at last there are signs that many people are making real efforts to avoid unnecessary wastage of the planet’s resources by recycling, upcycling and repurposing, though there’s so much more to be done and practiced daily.
One sad reality in the western world is that so much stuff we use cannot just simply be repaired at home if it breaks, and often can’t be affordably fixed by a qualified repair person, either, making it often much cheaper to just buy a replacement for the broken thing. Lots of footwear comes into this category, though I nearly always buy leather, which does last and is nearly always repairable. Of course, worst of all are electrical appliances and digital things like phones and TVs which feature built-in obsolescence, and we suffer frequent model changes that ensure that parts quickly become unavailable. Because of my upbringing this sticks in my throat.
Until I saw this really impressive exhibition, I hadn’t given any real thought to the activity of repairing something. But seeing these objects’ repairs, and reading about them, impressed on me that we repair things that are important or useful to us. We value their usefulness as daily household or work related items; we value objects which symbolise culture, politics, history or religion; some things we value because we simply find them pleasing or beautiful in some way; and sometimes objects are valuable because our ancestors owned and used them.
Repairing produces scars or visible marks, but that’s a very different expected outcome from the process of restoration, in which repairs are done as skillfully as possible to create the impression the object has been returned to its original appearance and function. It hadn’t occurred to me these are not really interchangeable words!
I don’t recall exactly, but think photography might not have been allowed, which would have been one reason I bought the catalogue; but the other would have been “Why the heck not, anyway?” Having bought two additional large suitcases in Cairo to contain textiles we’d acquired in Egypt, including two large Tentmaker hangings , we already had twice as much luggage as we’d set out with just a few weeks before !!
Gold in the lacquer highlights the break lines, producing additional surface design patterning – kintsugi.
That holds true for textiles as long as they have been properly cared for, of course. In France I could not resist this antique handkerchief/mouchoir, of hand embroidered linen batiste, from the late C19th I bought in the town of Bayeux, Normandy, where the antique dealer says she deals only in items purchased from north western France, mostly textiles and her stock cinluded some lovely lace edged things. Modern bobbin lace is made in that town, too, but I thought this piece was far more interesting and beautiful than even some of the most stunning and wonderful stuff the ladies down the road were making as we watched. It’s thin and soft, I like to think that it has been well used and carefully washed and stored between airings down the years. About 14″ square, it is a soft cream colour, photographed against black background. It is in very good condition with just a couple of teeny holes that could be moth holes. The opaque band is another layer of fabric appliqued to the front using minute stitching, and the decoration of that band is rows of satin stitched dots. The hand embroidery of the whole piece is so exquisite that you are hard pressed to tell the right from the wrong side in any part of it.
