Day 3 was a very full day...
Yasushi Ando, master Yuzen dyer, gave us a presentation on his art. I love this guy... so enthusiastic and excited about what he does, and he does it particularly well. I have more pictures of some of his work at the photo link above; please take a peek!
Yuzen dyeing uses rice paste as a resist to block out areas that are to remain uncolored... I'm not going to go into the process here but will try it one day at home on a very basic level and detail the process then. The roll here on the left is a full kimono; it features shibori, yuzen, and some rather fine embroidery.
Then Jorie Johnson, an American felt artist living in Kyoto, talked about her work, and what it was like bringing an unknown fiber art to Japan. Her work was impressive! Thoughtful inspiring art... She has made felt rugs to be used in tea houses in winter and small mats to be used under decorative vases for tea ceremonies, as well as the types of wearable items we're used to seeing (scarves, vests, mitts, etc).
After lunch, we walked to the Shibori museum, where we watched a video, viewed their latest exhibit, and had a shopping opportunity... I mentioned that I'd taken a shibori class there before, and showed the guide a photo; he knows our instructor from 9 years ago!
After the Shibori museum, we went to Sou Sou, which is about 7 or 8 shops from the same textile design company, each small shop covering one genre (women's clothes, men's clothes, hand clothes, shoes and tabi socks, etc). I bought a lovely handkerchief; beautiful cotton with bicycles on it. It wasn't until I got home and read the brochure, that I realized just how special their textiles are! They are Ise-momen cotton, which is lightly twisted cotton that is starched for hardness and woven on a hand loom; when the starch is washed out, you end up with remarkably soft cloth. Sou Sou gave me a free bag of potato chips for textile design fans.
And finally, an exhibition of various Kyoto textile artists, including a couple of modern yuzen kimono at Gallery Gallery, at the top of an old nearby building; Jorie was one of the exhibitors, and joined us at the gallery!
March 22 photos
Is there a better word to use to describe a trip to Yoshiko Mori's home and studio than pilgrimage? His family has been working with indigo since the 1870's. They grow their own indigo, harvest and strip the leaves from it. Then, it's fermented (composted) in their old barn, and formed into bricks for storage. The resident bacteria or spores or whatever that are perfect for fermenting the indigo are present in the mud and straw walls of the yarn... Mori-san showed us half a brick of indigo from one of their first batches; it's 140 years old; and the other half of the brick is in the Japanese National Museum.
Mori-san's jacket in this photo belonged to his grandfather, and is pretty much the same color now as it was then. The particular way Japanese indigo is made makes it particularly color-fast.
Then we learned what goes into an indigo vat, and saw where dyeing takes place; Mori-san and his son demonstrated dyeing yarn and washi paper, in large ceramic pots sunk into the ground; in the winter, a small brazier it set into wells between the pots to keep them a temperature that indigo likes.
I bought some indigo-dyed silk yarn that is the color of the sky, destined for my loom and eventually for my DH.
From there we went to the Miho Museum, a building with an amazing sense of space and presence, designed by I. M. Pei. We had a vegetarian bento lunch made from happy vegetables (seriously, we watched a video about it, and these are pampered vegetables), then wandered the museum for a couple of hours; I saw an exhibit on Japanese glass, then an exhibit with artifacts from the Ancient Orient; lots of Sumerian and Mesopotamian pieces. Google the Miho museum and look for images if you'd like to see it; I was too busy looking at the building to photograph it. However, it's a place made to be experienced and the photos I've seen don't do it justice. There's an initial building where you start that initiates you into the idea you're entering an interesting place; then a walk up a hill dotting with seasonally spectacular foliage (it'll be bursting into cherry blossom bloom shortly); then through a tunnel... when you near the end of the tunnel, the entrance to the museum is framed by the tunnel walls and ... well... you just need to see it. Especially the view out over the valley from the museum halls.
After that, we went on to Shigaraki, a pottery town dating back to the 1200's. Shigaraki is famous for it's Tenuki statues; they're a mythical Japanese raccoon-dog that does some amazing things with it's very large and stretchy scrotum (for example, uses it as a umbrella in the rain, or like an parachute)... But this is not why we came to Shigaraki. We met Satoshi Arakawa, who moved to the area to study pottery. Here's some of his work, welcoming us into his garden.
Arakawa-san built his own kiln, which he fires up twice a year to fire his pots without glaze for 5 days... He adds wood every 2 hours and goes through about 250 bundles of wood. The color and design on the pots comes from ash in the kiln settling into the pieces... He demonstrated how he mixes his own clay by mixing standard potters clay with light colored gritty clay he digs on this property, then created this lovely vase as we watched.
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