Contemporary textile artist and researcher Linda Brassington provides an unexpected and expansive critical perspective on the practices, meanings and heritage of a global textile technique.
Drawing connections across disciplines from visual arts to anthropology, Brassington provides a distinctly different alternative approach to the historical, technical and ethnographic accounts available. International case studies from traditional and contemporary artists, practitioners and performers take us through workshops, studios and dye rooms from England to Central Europe and Japan. Steeped in this practical and contextual understanding of the process, Brassington probes the visual and sensory language of her practice, the cultural anthropology of its formation, and the metaphorical and personal resonances of its materials, techniques, rhythms, and performative gestures.
At the heart of her study lies a bold redefinition of intangible cultural heritage, one that recognises artistic techniques and processes as living expressions of cultural identity and artistry. Moving beyond the transmission of skills and knowledge, her lyrical accounts reveal indigo and resist dyeing as a sensory space of lived experience with alongside material, colour and cloth, and make this innovative study an essential read for scholars, students, and practitioners alike.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Language of Resist Dyeing
Summary
Introduction
Farnham School of Art: a pedagogy in resist dyeing
Contributions to knowledge: an international perspective
The emergence of a visual and sensory language
Emotive language
Performative language
Poetic language
The space and place of resist dyeing
Narrative language: emotional connections
The language of intangible cultural heritage
2. Movement, Motion and Time: The Formation of Practice
Summary
Introduction
The domestic space: routes and pathways to making
From domestic workshop to professional studio
Material flow: paste and wax
Pattern, rhythm and repeat
Rhythms of resist: ‘blueprint’
Rhythms of shibori: cultural connections
Rhythms of Mashiko: a personal narrative
Movement, motion and time in practice
3. Process as Performance: Repetition, Ritual, Gesture
Summary
Introduction
Resist dyeing as bodily action
Observers of material flow
Chiyoko Tanaka
Performativity as material transformation
The subliming vessel
Performativity as physical and emotional experience
Space Shifters
Performativity in practice
4. Material as Metaphor: Colour as Stuff
Summary
Introduction
Indigo as substance
Indigo as pigment
Colour as stuff
Indigo: burnishing and polishing
Vantablack
Minerals and matter as ‘place’
Mud: the passage of time
Colour as stuff in practice
5. Theatres of Making: Space and Place
Summary
Introduction
Sites of practice: Kyoto
Sites of practice: Steinberg
Mashiko: Higeta Aizome Kobo
Tokyo: Edo Komon
Pu´chov: the Trnka workshop
Hranovnica: a hiatus in time
New technologies, new interpretations
Homme Plisse´ Issey Miyake
Arimatsu: the Harisho workshop
Memories of place
Space and place: practice in transition
6. The Intangible Cultural Heritage of Resist Dyeing
Summary
Introduction
‘Blueprint’: a hybrid of heritage
The role of contemporary practice
Signs of the past, signposts to the future
Poetic language in dye and cloth
Reiko Sudo: in search of ton-byan
The personification of intangible cultural heritage
Networks and meshworks
Creative agency through practice
Conclusion
Performance and performativity
Metaphorical interpretation
The relationship between theory and practice
Towards a new definition for intangible cultural heritage
Future Research
Bibliography
Index
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