Art and Design Commons^™

Hand-Spinning For Traditional Garments In Ladakh, Tracy P. Hudson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Ladakh is in the Indian Himalayas, in a high-altitude region that culturally overflows into Pakistan and China. Ladakh is part of the state of Jammu & Kashmir, in India. The most significant factors influencing the culture and traditions of Ladakh are climate, isolation, and inaccessibility. These factors result in a highly practical culture. Ladakh is isolated from the outside world for much of the year because of extreme cold and harsh winter weather. By necessity, Ladakhis have developed traditions and techniques to make the most of their resources, under specific and extreme climatic conditions. Thus their traditions are based in …

The Usage And Symbolic Meaning Of A Length Of White Cotton Cloth Used In Shamanist Rituals For The Dead In Korea, Jeeun Kim

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Good afternoon. I am Jeeun Kim. I am a working artist and I teach fiber-art classes at universities in Seoul, Korea. My interest in this topic began with a textile history class I took at UH. The class was taught by Pat Hickman, my mentor, and covered the history of world textiles and the social roles and transformation of traditional textiles. This class stimulated my curiosity about the textiles of my own culture. The class taught me to look not only at the appearance of textiles and how they are made but also to look at the social roles of …

Claudy Jongstra: Transmitting Craft Heritage Through Contemporary Architecture, Susan Brown

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Felt has a unique history as both a craft medium and an industrial material. Recently, it has become a material of intense interest to architects and designers. Felt is a very ancient and primitive material, made by simply matting together wool fibers with moisture and friction. It is a manufactured product, yet it shares many properties with purely natural materials. As a raw material for design, felt has incredible range — it can be made thin and translucent, or very dense and thick, even hard. Its plasticity is inviting a shift in the relationship of textiles to architecture and design. …

The Centre For Advanced Textiles: A Case Study In Uk Digital Textile Culture, Eulanda A. Sanders

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Introduction

The faculty and graduate students at the Centre for Advanced Textiles (CAT), located in the Glasgow School of Arts in Scotland, have created a unique academic environment that not only employs culture in design inspiration, but also creates a dynamic academic culture. The team consists of the following five, individuals who are all practicing designers and researchers: Alan Shaw, Industry Coordinator; Vicky Begg, Bureau Coordinator; Helena Britt, a Practitioner/Educator/Graduate Student; and Andrew McDonald, a Research Assistant/Graduate Student and J.R. Campbell, the Research Fellow/Coordinator. Each faculty member and graduate student on this team interacts with each other on various activities …

Black Silk, Brown Silk: China And Beyond—Traditional Practice Meets Fashion, Abby Lillethun

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This report discusses black-colored silks from southeastern Asia that are often referred to as “gummed” silks. These silks are treated with iron-rich mud that coats the silk filaments and creates a deep black color (often in conjunction with a previous coloration). The report covers three areas. Firstly, I review various names used for black mud-treated silks and begin to contextualize the production and use region. Two mud-treated silk samples from early-1930s Southeast Asia are introduced in this discussion. Secondly, I initiate investigation into the role of mud-treated black silks in Chinese fashion history during the transition from the late-imperial era …

Analysis Of Two Chinese Canton Silks: Jiāo-Chou And Xiang-Yun-Shā, Shu Lin

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Jiāo-chou (黑絞绸) and Xiang-yun-shā (香雲紗) and are two types of Chinese Canton silk. According to Qing (or Ching) Dynasty documents, Jiāo-chou and Xiang-yun-shā were available as early as the 5th century and these textiles, as well as garments fabricated from them, were exported from Canton as early as the 15th century. Contemporary historians suggested that garments fabricated in Jiāo-chou and Xiang-yun-shā were worn by Chinese in the Honolulu area in the early-20th century. A few of these garments can now be found in the Antique Asian Costume Collection at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (UHM). According to the accession …

Donning The Cloak: Safavid Figural Silks And The Display Of Identity, Nazanin Hedayat Shenasa, Nazanin Hedayat Munroe

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Introduction

In a red world bathed in shimmering gold light, a man sits with his head in his hand as wild beasts encircle him. He is emaciated, has unkempt hair, and wears only a waistcloth—but he has a dreamy smile on his face. Nearby, a camel bears a palanquin carrying a stately woman, her head tipped to one side, arm outstretched from the window of her traveling abode toward her lover. Beneath her, the signature “Work of Ghiyath” is woven in Kufic script inside an eightpointed star on the palanquin (Fig. 1).

This depiction of the literary characters Layla and …

Rediscovering Camlet: Traditional Mohair Cloth Weaving In Southeastern Turkey, Charlotte Jirousek

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

It is well known that mohair, derived from the Angora goat, was long unique to Turkey, and only successfully reared outside of that region in the 150 years. The term Angora is an archaic spelling of the city now known as Ankara, now Turkey’s capital, but in the Ottoman era it was a sleepy town known as a center for weaving and selling the mohair raised in the region.

As the ambassador from Emperor Ferdinand of Austria to Constantinople, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbeq made a journey into Anatolia to Amasya in 1556, where Sultan Suleyman was encamped, one of the …

Translation Of Medium: Kesi Meets Painting, Jean Kares

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

My current project places kesi, or pictorial silk tapestry, in closer proximity to the discourse of Chinese art history, and raises questions about the hierarchical categorization of creative production. Kesi was produced in China beginning in the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127 CE) as a method of weaving that allowed for designs that were independent of loom controlled patterning. When the weavers employed in imperial workshops adopted the medium, they expanded its design repertoire from overall patterning to a means of creating pictures. Indeed, a kesi artwork functioned as a painting, both visually and in its role as an art …

Abstracts

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Abstracts A-Z

Representation And Self-Presentation In Late Antique Egypt: ‘Coptic’ Textiles In The British Museum, Elisabeth R. O'Connell

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Among late antique textiles in the British Museum Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan (hereafter, AES), nearly half (c. 135) are said to have come from the Upper Egyptian town of Akhmim. If the attribution to the site is correct, the textiles provide the Museum with an excellent opportunity to discuss the transformation of Egypt in Late Antiquity through the lens of death and burial.

The late antique site is well represented in Greek and Coptic literature and by the material culture of the city and its cemeteries. The modern name Akhmim holds a vestige of the name Min, the …

Perceptual Trace, Sherry Black

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

My work stems from the activity of perception through the drawing process, and a mental analysis of what I imagine but cannot see. The contemplative state of drawing is a careful outward projection, an internal dialog with an extemal object. Each work is a heightened state of perception as I seek clarity to distill the moment while meditating on my own physical existence. Apprehending by means of the senses is universal. In the most basic terms, the activities of perception amount to small, seemingly inconsequential moments. Yet, perception is a personal, even intimate occurrence, which is individualized. I am interested …

Specious I Spacious, Amanda Smith

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

The way that I think and the way I develop paintings might qualify as an "obsession to know more by organizing what we know in new ways." I have a particular attraction to paradoxes and dualities; in order to know something, I need to examine what it is not. This notion establishes the foundation for a relationship between painting and film in my studio practice. I look to cinema as source material -- visual information to break apart, analyze, and synthesize into new worlds of my own invention. In my paintings, I seek to represent the confusion of spatial experience …

Constant Daydream, Anne Ruehrmund

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

"That the world of things can open itself to reveal a secret life - indeed, to reveal a set of actions and hence a narrativity and history outside the given field of perception - is a constant daydream that the miniature presents. This is the daydream of the microscope: the daydream oflife inside life, of significance multiplied infinitely within significance. " My work depicts an imaginary world of objects, where secret desires and complex relationships are explored through a language of decorations and toys. I am interested in what draws us to amusing or nostalgic objects, whose only function is …

The Use Of Trapezoidal Tunics With Curved Warp Borders As A Means To Define The Pica Tarapacá Cultural Group Of Northern Chile (900-1200 Ad), Carolina Agüero

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

During the time in the Andes known as the Late Intermediate Period (900-1450 AD), the Tarapacá region was socially integrated with societies that articulated resources from different areas through numerous strategies of exploitation. Dispersed settlements in the region suggest methods of habitation like those known to llama caravan traders. Although it has been explained how, in this period, the Pica-Tarapaca Complex controlled the territory, it has not been studied how the inhabitants of the area understood their common identity. It might be assumed that if identity is recognized as one aspect of sociopolitical connection, then affiliation with the Pica-Tarapaca Complex …

Soft Or Modern? Delineating Curtains In Domestic Interiors Of Modern Architecture, Açalya Allmer

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

“My windows hung with lace curtains (Valenciennes, Venice, Bruges, Scotland) combined according to the formula:  =  m (m - 1) (m - 2) … (m – n + 1).”  These are the words of Bourgeois, the fictive character in Le Corbusier’s seminal book The Decorative Art of Today (1925). Le Corbusier’s witty attack on curtains was common in the dominant rhetoric of modern architecture in which drapes and curtains were regarded as superficial, fleeting, and effeminate. This paper deals with curtains in domestic interiors, exploring the correlation that exists between the representation and function of the drapery in modern architecture: …

A Stitch In Time: New Embroidery, Old Fabric, Changing Values, Annin Barrett

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Using contemporary embroidered artwork as a bellwether for changing social relationships, this paper will discuss how values regarding time, family and gender roles have evolved in the past couple of generations. Artists such as Orly Cogan, Louise Bourgeois, and Shanon Schollian embroider on vintage textiles to tell a new story about contemporary life. The past is invoked by the use of recycled household cloth, freshly stitched with a witty approach toward domestic imagery.  This contrast between old and new textile layers signifies an elegiac distance from past ways of living and serves as a measure of how much society has …

Catching The Light, Catching The Waves: The Suzani Collection Of Doris Duke At Shangri La In Honolulu, Hawai‛I, Carol Bier

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Among the earliest collections of suzani in the United States is that acquired by Doris Duke, kept at Shangri La, the home she built in Honolulu. Nine of the suzani she purchased in India while on her honeymoon in 1935. In January 2005 the Shangri La Suzani Research Project initiated a collaborative effort to document Duke's collection with respect to materials, stitches, designs, patterns, colors, and ground fabrics. Suzanis represent an urban embroidery tradition in the 19th century and perhaps earlier; they are worked by young women of Uzbekistan and neighboring regions in Central Asia. Bright and colorful, they are …

Norwegian Natural Dyeing: Art, Craft, Gender And Innovation - Natural Dyes As A Tradition In Norway, Mette Biering

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper describes how the knowledge about natural dyes survived the introduction of aniline dyes to Norway in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century. How this happened involved women, for there was a great campaign to keep the traditional colors alive for the continued use in woven cloth, coverlets, tapestries and folk costumes. At the beginning of the nineteenth century great efforts were made by women to restore and re-design traditional folk costumes; they were therefore in a position to keep the dye knowledge in the face of industrial competition. There was a country-wide search to gather dye recipes from …

Social Cohesion And Cultural Expressions: The Case Of The Sacred Textiles In The Armenian Orthodox Churches Of Istanbul, Marlene R. Breu, Ronald T. Marchese

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper reports on data collected from textiles used in the religious life of members of the Armenian Orthodox Church community of Istanbul, Turkey, specifically consecrated items associated with the expression of the Divine Liturgy.  Our analysis of selected objects and their inscriptions revealed a valuable source of information about the culture and how it expressed itself in one of the key aspects of Armenian identity as a minority population in the Islamic society of Istanbul—its religion.  The production and use of these artifacts contributed to the cohesiveness of a people both in Istanbul and in the Diaspora, where Armenians …

A Poem Is A Robe And A Castle: Inscribing Verses On Textiles And Architecture In The Alhambra, Olga Bush

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper studies the interrelationship between textiles, architecture and poetry in the Alhambra, the palatial complex of the Nasrids, the last Muslim dynasty in the Iberian Peninsula.  Poetic figures likening architecture to textiles in parietal inscriptions, which I will call “textile metaphors,” are the crux of this interrelationship.  I limit discussion to a single example from the epigraphy of the Alhambra: a poem inscribed in the interior of the Qalahurra al-jadıda, a tower-palace in the palatial complex.  The focal point is the term muwashsha, common to the vocabulary of textile design and literary form, which is further employed here to …

Embroidering The Golden Chersonese: Metallic Thread Needlework In The Malay Peninsula, Hwei-Fe’N Cheah

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Metallic thread embroidery is a historically significant form of textile decoration in the Malay peninsula, Ptolemy’s “Golden Khersonese” of ancient times.   Pillow ends, cushion covers, food covers and decorative hangings elaborately embroidered with gold- and silver-wrapped thread were conspicuously displayed at court and at weddings as symbols of rank and wealth.  Undertaken by noblewomen, metallic thread embroidery was a point of pride and skillfully crafted items were presented as gifts to foreign royalty.  Although no longer as visible, metallic thread embroidery has nevertheless retained a place in ceremony as part of Malay adat or custom and is now valued as …

From Construction To Ritual Function: An Exploration Of New Guinea Fiber Masterworks, Jill D’Alessandro, Christina Hellmich

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Non-loom techniques used by generations of women in New Guinea to create everyday necessities, and by men to fabricate sacred ritual objects reveal a mastery of the fantastic and ephemeral materials found in their island surrounds. Collectors Marcia and John Friede have amassed a collection of over 3000 works that comprise the Jolika collection of New Guinea Art at San Francisco’s de Young Museum including many historic tours de force made exclusively of plant fibers and materials.  These works celebrate the rich and diverse local and regional artistic traditions based on core fabrication techniques of tapa making, plaiting, coiling, twining …

“Revisiting The Ocucaje Opened Tunic From The Textile Museum; Washington, D.C.: Textile Models And The Process Of Imitation”, Sophie Desrosiers

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Features of the Ocucaje textile (accession number 1959.11.1) belonging to the Textile Museum Washington, D.C. have previously been analyzed by Mary Frame as representing designs derived from thread and sprang imagery.  A new look at the textile reveals a textile model. The origin of this model will be traced as well as the innovation of new procedures used in the process of imitation.

The Conservation Of Three Hawaiian Feather Cloaks, Elizabeth Nunan, Aimée Ducey

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Feather capes and cloaks of the ali`i communicate the history of the Hawaiian people through their presence in museum collections around the world. The collection of thirteen of these textile garments at the Bishop Museum attests to the legacy of the museum’s founders: the desire of the descendants of the ali`i  to preserve their heritage so that future generations may continue to learn about Native Hawaiian culture, its history and values. As such, the ahu`ula are central to the narratives describing that history and serve as signifiers of its values. From the life of the original owner, to later use …

Atlas Today: Patterns Of Production, Bazaars And Bloomingdales Uzbekistan And Xinjiang, China, Mary M. Dusenbury

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In the summer of 2007 a team of six people gathered in Tashkent, at the Central Asian heart of the ancient Silk Road. We were two museum curators, three artists and university professors and a photographer. We came from the United States and Japan. We were interested in contemporary textile production, the role of textiles in daily life and the rich cultural heritage of the region. We traveled for three weeks throughout Uzbekistan – from the comparatively lush Ferghana Valley in the east (silk moiré, ikat, silk velvet ikat), to Boysun in the southern mountains near Afghanistan (tent band rugs, …

Industrial Production And The Hand Process: Making A Bridge, Catharine Ellis

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The power loom has long been a time and labor saving device resulting in a separation of the weaver/designer from the process of making cloth. This is evident in the Taiten shibori fabrics of the early 20th century, the only form of Japanese loom woven shibori. Taiten fabric was woven of plain weave with heavier threads placed at intervals in the warp. When the cloth is removed from the loom the heavy threads are pulled to form a resist for dyeing. While developing my own process of woven shibori I was not able to understand why the Japanese never developed …

Silent Needles, Speaking Flowers: The Language Of Flowers As A Tool For Communication In Women’S Embroidery In Victorian Britain, Christen Elaine Ericsson, Mary Brooks

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Language of Flowers, a dictionary of symbolic meanings assigned to individual flowers, was established in Europe during the early 19th century as a result of the leisure classes’ interests in botany and a social preoccupation with romance and chivalry.

Victorian upper class women, isolated within their assigned domestic sphere had a limited number of acceptable activities available for them.  With restrictions place upon them by society regarding appropriate behavior, the possibility that some women sought methods of covert communication and expression exists.

Embroidery, so inextricably linked to the Victorians’ definition of femininity, could have been an ideal form through …

The Serpentine Essence Of A Chancay Gauze Headdress, Jessica Gerschultz

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

A colorful Chancay gauze fragment in the Michael C. Carlos Museum’s collection of Andean textiles deserves consideration for the ingenious yet unpublished technical combination of its weave structure. Its Late Intermediate Period weaver pushed beyond technical limitations to join the laborious techniques of gauze weaving and discontinuous warping to reinforce the cloth’s protective and regenerative functions. Worn on the head during moments of transformation, the headdress would have empowered its wearer in ritual contexts, perhaps helping her to initiate her own rebirth in the afterlife. The weaver’s sophisticated fusion of the two techniques resulted in “jumping” serpentine figures, rendered in …

Textiles, Masculinities And Spontaneous Communities In The Burning Man Project, Susan Kaiser, Denise Nicole Green

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

For one week of the year nearly 50,000 individuals make the pilgrimage to the desolate Black Rock Desert in Northwestern Nevada to participate in the creation of culture. As an experiment in ephemeral Bohemia, the Burning Man Project (BMP) provides a space for unbridled creative expression. This festal gathering seeks to replace commodified with communified material culture. The latter works to move beyond the capitalist “disconnect” between production and consumption, toward a model that bridges the two.

The BMP is a work in progress, with a reflexive awareness of the challenges involved in integrating collective participation and a gift economy …