Recently one of my sisters sent me two offcut pieces from a length of batik she’d bought in Cirebon on the northern side of Java, Indonesia, back in around 1977 during a time she was working there. Like many of us who buy fabric, at the time she didn’t know what she was going to do with it, only that she loved the colours and the pattern in this totally outstanding piece.
She says not only is the pattern a very special one – but the colours are unusual, too: a little black, some dark chocolate brown, then there’s green, turquoise, creamy yellow and white. The sense of depth is incredible. As with all traditional textile crafts anywhere in the world, today’s patterns reflect a history of cultural influences responding to new political conditions. So for those who can read this batik, it displays C13 chinese cultural influences from the time of Kublai Kan. The Dutch colonial period and mid C20 movement to independence were factors in the rise of Yogyakarta and the concurrent decline of this region’s importance in batik production. No, I don’t claim to be able to read it, I am just passing on what my sister told me about this piece, but I have put Cirebon on my list of places I need to visit.
A few months ago, looking for something to cover a panel or screen in her home, she found this forgotten piece in her box. I haven’t seen the screen yet, but I also wonder what else is in that box …
Partly for scale but also to add to the perspective of this beautiful, elegant fabric, I snapped it with a pair of enormous sunglasses from the same era, 1975. I still occasionally wear these, they have always been favs, and they do make some kind of statement, – always did. They live in a bag I whipped up from scraps of fabric I used in the 1981 to make a bedspread. The pondy/murky khaki and turquoise print is a batiked cotton twill I bought in Malaysia, around 1973.
Following the theme of a recent post on Souvenirs with Meaning (Oct 1 2007) this one also evokes a lot of memories. (coincidentally that too, was prompted by batik) My sister now has in her home a daily reminder of several years’ living and working in Jakarta. This same fabric prompted memories from my own, totally different, life experiences at around the same time …. what a powerful souvenir a piece of fabric can be.
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.
On a members-only SAQA critique blog the other day, Kristin LaFlamme posted a work in progress, continuing with a theme she is following, of those of us who have nomadic lifestyles and the issue of putting down roots, or feeling the need to, or indeed feeling the absence of roots. She showed a pic of lots of little houses along the top with a huge void beneath, and talked of how she plans to go on, options, etc. I commented that her image reminded me of this work of mine, executed in 1985 or 1986, and said I’d try to find it and post it on this blog. so it’s the subject today, as it has prompted me in several ways.
We were living in a town we had lived some years earlier, the gold mining town of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. In our first stint there we had been living in a house up on a company mining lease. The lovely park-like setting for these houses was actually atop a slime dump (underground waste material) beneath which were large caverns remaining after ore had been mined decades previously. It always bothered me to think of what was below, and I was never so glad as when we drove off those leases for the last time. We went back, to live again, another company, years later – and then saw that what is now called the Super Pit, had already been started to mine the area beneath those housing areas. And they have long since gone. It’s now a vast pit, kilometeres long and who knows how deep. (I’m sure there’s masses of stuff to google on Kalgoorlie, the Super Pit, and related links – I haven’t looked though)
How I felt about that time and situation was expressed in this stitchery, entitled “On The Golden Mile” and included in a solo exhibition of embroidery I had in 1987. The background was lightly spray painted, the minute stitchery done in either danish flower thread or single or double strands of stranded embroidery thread/floss. There’s lots of running stitch, standard and and long stemmed french knots, and fly stitch used in various ways in the vegetation. From memory, the overall dimensions are about 16″ x 14″, and so the houses and trees are pretty small ! and very small by comparison with the vastness of the open cut pit that has already been commenced below.
It is one thing to look back over work done back in the past, not only from the point of being struck by amazement at doing this kind of thing (my eyes were so much younger then) but further thoughts develop, principal among them ideas on where I was and what I was then preoccupied with, and how these things tie in with where I am now. Interesting.
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.
Recently one of my sisters sent me two offcut pieces from a length of batik she’d bought in Cirebon on the northern side of Java, Indonesia, back in around 1977
during a time she was working there. Like many of us who buy fabric, at the time she didn’t know what she was going to do with it, only that she loved the colours and the pattern in this totally outstanding piece.
