CONTENTS
INDULGE textiles to buy, collect or simply admire 11 IRISH LIST Polly Leonard’s Celtic wish list 58 BINDING KNOTS The symbolic Nature of Forest+ Found by Ptolemy Mann, images by Dean Hearne
GLOBAL textiles from around the world 16 IRISH EYE CANDY A Journey through Irish Textiles By Siobhan Corrigan 52 THE CHECKERED HISTORY OF CHECKS Contemporary African artists speak about plaid by Liese Van Der Watt
ANECDOTE textiles that touch our lives 27 MISCELLANY Know Your Checks illustrated by Susy Pilgrim-Waters 28 THE SCOTTISH DRAPER Cloth takes on mythologies and a skin-like presence under the brush of Alison Watt By Dr Catherine Harper, images by Tony Buckingham 96 SWATCH Favourite Fabric no.32: Black Watch Tartan By Sarah Jane Downing, illustrated by Susy Pilgrim-Waters
ATTIRE critical reporting of fashion trends 22 COST:WEAR Dressing responsibly has never been so easy By Sass Brown 62 PERENNIAL PROMISES Rebecca Carr’s seasonless clothes are designed to be worn and loved for life By Grace Warde-Aldam, images by Jim Marsden 72 REVERENTIALThe weaver Amy Revier By Grace Warde-Aldam, images by Jake Curtis 76 FASHION MADE FAIR Marcia Patmos, New York By Ellen Köhrer and Magdalena Schaffrin
CONCEPT textiles in fine art 20 FLOCK OF SHEARING Brigitta Varadi explores Irish sheep markings By Eleanor Flegg 32 SLASH AND SHOW The controversial textiles of Jilli Blackwood By Jennifer Harper, images by Shannon Tuft 58 CROSSING CONTINENTS The lineage of Tartan and Madras By Sarah Jane Downing
INDUSTRY from craft to commerce 16 MODERN IRISH John Hanly & Co.’s twist on traditional tweeds By Eleanor Flegg, images by Mike Bunn 24 THE GREEN CUBE The journey of Marseille Soap By Anne Laure Camilleri 51 INDUSTRIAL INSPIRATION An online resource shows Indian textile history in a new light 70 TANGLED WEB What to consider before buying ‘ethically’ By Grace Warde-Aldam 78 SHOP TALK no 1 Jane Audas shopping at Mouki Mou
FLOCK OF SHEARING Brigitta Varadi explores Irish sheep markings
Encounter a sheep on a narrow Irish road and it will stare at you wild-eyed before plunging away, its ragged fleece stained pink and electric blue. Half a mile on, twin lambs are freshly painted in buttercup yellow and green. The colours represent ownership – a different pattern for each farm – but in terms of the coding of sheep, this is the iceberg’s tip. As a young Hungarian felt-maker living in the north west of Ireland, Brigitta Varadi soon realised that there was more to the markings than met the eye. The sheep is an animal of interest to felt makers, and she was fascinated by the painterly quality of the colours; but information was hard to find. She was new to the country. Both she and the farmers were isolated and shy.
Almost fifteen years passed. During this time Varadi’s work underwent a transformation. I wrote about her in the early years, then met her at a craft fair in 2004. I admired a cushion, crosshatched like the cobwebbed window of an Irish cottage, its expressive nature barely contained within its simple form. “You can have it,” she said. “It’s the last one. I’m not making any more cushions.” From that moment on, she would focus on her art practice. Her work had evolved and there was nothing that she could do about it, so she took a deep breath and went with it. For several years her work was in flux. She went to Finland where she exhibited translucent panels and chrysalis forms.We met again in Carrick-on-Shannon in 2013. Her work had settled and the gallery was hung with large wall-hung works, powerful felted renditions of Rorschach ink blots. “What is it?” “Well, what do you think it is?” That series, Decoding Time, was made in imported materials – merino wool, 4
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geographic origin of genuine Marseille soap. Utterly determined to separate their traditional soaps from an overwhelming competition of cheap knock-offs, they recently applied for the PGI protection mark.
The Marseille soap recipe has not changed for centuries and is amazingly simple: vegetable oils, soda, sea salt from Camargue and water. The household white cube is made from palm and copra oils; the green cube used for the skin is made from olive and copra oils. Copra oil acts as a natural foaming agent in both soaps. The exclusive Marseille process takes fourteen days to be made. Time, expertise and openair cauldrons are key elements. The five steps of saponification begin once all the ingredients have been poured into the large cauldron and gradually brought to 120°C. The chemical reaction produces soap and glycerin, the latter being washed away. The salt enables the soap to separate from the lye. The Soap Master oversees the boiling soap for ten days, tasting the paste to evaluate the remaining amount of salt and adding water to rinse the mixture.The soap paste is washed many times to remove the salt and all lye molecules, earning the soap its Extra Pur designation.All residual impurities settle at the bottom of the tank and are drained off.The paste rests for two days.
The soap is then poured into large concrete vats, previously dusted with talcum powder to prevent the soap from sticking during the hardening stage. Windows are left wide open to let the mistral wind dry the soap, which takes 2-3 days. Finally, the soap is cut into 35kg blocks later sliced into bars and cubes. Soap cubes are stamped on all six sides with logos clearly stating the mandatory quality standards of the
Marseille process, such as 72% d’Huile or Extra Pur, the soap-maker’s name and now UPSM.
Naturally hypo-allergenic, biodegradable, fragrance and additive free, genuine Marseille soaps can replace a wide range of products. The white soap is an all time favourite for laundry, while the green cube is renowned for soothing the most sensitive skins. An old trick is to allow it to cure at home for some time. The water evaporates, thus increasing the moisterizing properties of the soap.The black soap recipe contains caustic potash instead of lye. It is a remarkable multi-purpose cleaner and a natural flea repellent quite popular with plant nurseries and farmers. ••• Anne Laure Camilleri Marius Fabre. Marius Fabre, 148 Avenue Paul Bourret, 13300 Salon-de-Provence www.marius-fabre.com p 24-25
THE SCOTTISH DRAPER
Cloth takes on mythologies and a skin-like presence under the brush of Alison Watt
Alison Watt’s huge-scale Butterfly tapestry was commissioned by Scottish Opera and completed at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh in 2014. There is a long and extraordinary history of European tapestry weaving that includes the portable, ceremonial and insulating ‘nomadic murals’ of the Middle Ages, those famously produced around the regions of Arras and Flanders, such as the fabulous 15th century six-part La Dame à la Licorne (The Lady and the Unicorn) stored in the Musée de Cluny, Paris, the ecstatic Jean Lurçat tapestries in Aubusson, and those still made at the Gobelins factory, and celebrated throughout the world through, for example, the International Tapestry Network (ITNET).
And of course tapestry is rooted in mythologies and arachnologies such as that of Penelope, faithful wife of Odysseus, who weaves her shroud by day and unravels it by night. For two decades she keeps unwanted suitors at bay by that weave-unravel repetition, until her husband returns from the Trojan War and his accursed wanderings. Or of Ariadne, wife of the Greek god Dionysus, who uses her red tapestry thread to lead Theseus – with whom she has fallen in love – safely to the labyrinth’s sacrificial centre and then safely out again.
Watt’s Butterfly owes much of its provenance to that long history before, and to the equally lengthy tradition of the creation of flat ‘cartoons’ – from which to weave the required image and the simple stuff of cloth – that informs textile sensibility and practice.
But Alison Watt is a Scottish painter in oils rather than a tapestry weaver, with a strong fundament in portraiture and nudes, in which fabric is either accompanying and adorning the human – often female – body (as in her Disposition of Linen of 1992) or the flesh itself has the textile quality of a flour bag; off-whitish, weep-puffy, bed-crumpled and silently sagging (as in Pears of 1994).
It was into these primary non-woven works that Watt further introduced her depictions of painted cloth, culminating in the production of twelve very large-scale painted renditions of draped fabric, without bodies or firmament, collectively titled Shift (2000). Not only did drapery, sags and fabric folds then become the key subject for her paintings as in the oil on canvas Oblique (2004), leaving behind bodies or portraiture: these two-dimensional works then further developed outwards from their original flat canvas fabric substrates, to become of three-dimensional fabric artefact significance as Watt also began to produce linen-bound books to accompany her exhibited paintings.
The folds, drapes, rumples and ruches of whitish toned fabric in Watt’s paintings have a dusty plaster feel, akin to the schematic, formulaic or sculptural forms of ancient Greek and Roman statuary, and aligned with the confusions and complexities of the baroque and the classical that Gen Doy evocatively discusses in her Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture (2001). Leonardo da Vinci’s expressive semi-clothed male nudes, Christo’s gargantuan Wrapped Reichstag, and the larger, decorative and grand cloth arrangements of the post-Renaissance are also conjured. But there is a decidedly bodily softness in the dusty monochromes that is reminiscent of a more tenderly human skin quality that even breathes the sensation of aged, doughy, powdery, wrinkly skin into the paintings. They are poignantly suggestive of action before and actions afterwards, even while portraying the perverse absence of body that draped cloth on its own reveals.
There is coquetry, ambiguity and taboo also at play in Alison Watt’s work, where draped white fabric hints in its folds of darker, private parts, reminding the viewer of the fascination of a curving cleavage, a shadow of dark hair glimpsed between lily thighs, or even of milky virgin labia that should never be seen. The tantalising and knowing sexualty in Watt’s paintings is about both the promise of disclosure and the failure of the disclosed, and considering the massive scale of Watt’s Phantom exhibition, there is an additional dimension that calls into question the relationship between the apparently diminutive viewer and the enveloping pillows, ghostly fluidities, and majestic dramas of these huge folds and drapes.
So for me,Watt transcends an interest in the fabric itself and takes us into a physiologically affective territory that may prove unsettling and uncanny, familiar and unfamiliar, disconcerting and even just plain odd.
ingham
The Butterfly tapestry for Scottish Opera, in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, continues the interest 4 Tony Buck
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CONVERSATIONAL CHAIRS Bokja bring Lebanese craftsmanship and politics to the fore
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Left: Baroudi and Hibri sorting through textiles at the Bokja atelier located in Beirut, Lebanon Below: Flower Power sofa, the permanent collection of the Centre nationale des arts plastiques in Paris.
How best to tell a story? How best to share a memory? Words? Pictures? Smell? Sound? Anyone who has seen any of Bokja’s exquisite pieces of upholstered furniture would, I’m sure, add textiles to this list. Across the Arab world, a bokja is an embellished textile wrapping to carry personal belongings. It is often used to hold a bride’s dowry – gifts from the women in her family wishing her a happy future. Fittingly, Bokja is also the name of Beirutbased surface fabrication studio, co-founded by Hoda Baroudi and Maria Hibri, in 2000. Their signature approach has an international following – pieces of previously used fabric, each with its own history, carefully joined together and upholstered onto often classic pieces of furniture, which find themselves transformed from one life to the next by the unexpected, brilliant juxtapositions of colour, pattern, texture and surface . Each piece is a one-off and comes with its own passport, listing its name, ‘date of birth’ and description – the start of its new journey.
Baroudi and Hibri work with a wide range of local craftspeople, drawing on centuries of knowledge, often undocumented and passed down through first-hand experience. Each piece demands different skills and knowledge of the application of these in different sequences. Fundamentally and importantly, being involved in the realisation of a piece enables these specialist craftspeople to apply their knowledge and skills in a contemporary rather than a traditional context. In an interview published in Vogue Living in Nov/Dec 2010, Baroudi said, “We collaborate with artisans who use their hands, and our mission is to help those people and to make these handicrafts last.” Part of Bokja’s raison d’être is exactly this – 4
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