“No Doubt, No Awakening.”
For years I was puzzled - “Why I am so fascinated with Japanese ‘arashi shibori?”
This very esoteric and little-known method of creating pattern on cloth.
I didn’t realise how rare it was until I had been doing it for years.
First I prepare my cloth, carefully wrapping it around a pole.
Secondly I bind, in a satisfying rhythmic kind of way. (Like playing an instrument.)
Thirdly I compress, pushing the fabric into a unique 3D shape that can never be repeated.
Now it is ready to dye.
To many shibori is ‘tie and dye’- and I suppose it is, although the term ‘tie dye’ does not do service to the complexity, refinement and subtlety of shibori. The finest shibori treads a delicate line between control and chaos. The artist, author and scholar Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada poetically describes is as being ‘memory on cloth’ - which fits my experience of making shibori perfectly.
Each one is a reflection of me, my state of mind, and the textile I choose to work with at that moment in time. I cannot replicate any my work unless I create multiples all at the same time. Shibori is an intimate conversation with cloth, never to be repeated. Through my practise over time I have come to understand that Shibori asks something much deeper of us - it is a life lesson in commitment and letting go of outcomes
First is the patience, the control. We must meticulously prepare our cloth.
Second is the chaos, the uncontrollable. We commit to change. At this stage we must accept that whatever will be will be. We cannot change the past.
Thirdly we have to end the process to see our work that we have made. This takes a leap of faith - once opened, we cannot go back.
As my practise has developed I find myself further exploring ways to introduce chaos into my work, at times taking actions to seemingly purposefully destroy it.
An example would be with my work ‘Eraser’ which was shortlisted for the Japanese KOGEI award in 2020. For ‘Eraser’ I worked black on black, putting a resist onto black textiles and over-dyeing with another kind of black. Repeatedly removing and redyeing, erasing, redyeing, erasing, redyeing.
Was I creating something beautiful?
Was I ruining my work?
Was I even doing anything to my work at all?
I had literally no idea, I had taken steps to obscure the outcome from myself as much as possible. The more I gave to this work, the larger these questions grew in my mind.
All of this was with the vision to create “a void”. A black-hole of nothingness. And at some point it had to end.
There is a Buddhist saying;-
“No doubt, no awakening.”