Product Description

Memory On Cloth is a Kodansha International publication.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #296557 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 212 pages

From Library Journal
Best known in the United States as tie-dye, shibori is a traditional Japanese resist-dye technique that gained popularity along with other folk art movements of the 1960s and 1970s. With the rediscovery of its techniques, shibori's popularity spread worldwide; there have been three international symposiums on shibori, the last in 1999 in Chile. Artisan and author Wada (Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing) has promoted and taught this technique for years. Here, the author outlines shibori's transition from craft to fiber art in traditional and nontraditional formats, focusing on the works of several artists. The descriptions are accompanied by illustrations that are well placed though a bit muted. For in-depth information on both the technique and its history, there is no substitute for Wada's earlier book, which is in its ninth printing. Focusing on more advanced forms of a dyeing technique, this volume is rather narrow in topic and recommended only for specialized or fiber art collections. Public libraries that have the earlier book will want to pass. Karen Ellis, Nicholson Memorial Lib. Syst., Garland, TX
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Best known in the United States as tie-dye, shibori is a traditional Japanese resist-dye technique that gained popularity along with other folk art movements of the 1960s and 1970s. With the rediscovery of its techniques, shibori's popularity spread worldwide. Artisan and author Wada (Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing) has promoted and taught this technique for years. Here, the author outlines shibori's transition from craft to fiber art in traditional and nontraditional formats. The descriptions are accompanied by illustrations that are well placed though a bit muted. For in-depth information on both the technique and its history, there is no substitute for Wada's earlier book, which is in its ninth printing. Focusing on more advanced forms of a dyeing technique, this volume is rather narrow in topic and recommended only for specialized or fiber art collections. Public libraries that have the earlier book will want to pass" -Library Journal
"... substantially broadens the [Japanese] term shibori ... to similar processes used all over the world." -European Textile Network
"... this book will confirm old passions - and ignite new ones for initiates." -Textile Fibre Forum
"... a sumptuous book, sure to delight the art lover and the expert designer. Profusely illustrated, it captures shibori's planned and accidental evanescence, its ability to express seemingly endless variations of color and texture." -Sigrid Wortmann Weltge, American Craft

From the Publisher
FOREWORD TO THE BOOK

Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada has chosen her subject well. As the global authority on shibori in its myriad forms Wada has, for decades, been the driving force behind this tradition's popularization. She is also spearhead of the International Shibori Symposium (ISS). Even so, this author is not fully appreciated, even by those who know her, even by the many in her debt for opening doors to art expression or commerce. Perhaps because of her diminutive frame, seeming reticence, and prolonged youth, we don't recognize a Colossus spanning East and West, past and future.

Decades ago, when the San Francisco Bay area was the absolute Vatican of fiber development in the Americas, Wada first served as a conduit to Asian resist-patterning traditions. As a founder of Kasuri Dyeworks and instructor at Fiberworks, Center for Textile Arts, she nurtured innovators such as Ed Rossbach and Katherine Westphal. Perhaps more than anyone else, Wada caused the evolution of fiber focus from cloth structure to the dye patterning that we now recognize as surface design.

Through her first book, Shibori, and through her exhibits, lectures, and personal persuasion in every communication medium, Wada has single-handedly changed our field and its language. For instance, the Malay/Indonesian term plangi, first proposed by Swiss scholars and widely used for almost a century, is now less often heard than the Wada term, shibori -- itself an umbrella for dozens of methods including fold-dye, stitch and clamp resists, and even a woven form.

Still more crucial at the dawn of the third millennium are shibori methods as the most dynamic of all textile aspects. While patterning with liquid resists (batik) or binding yarns to resist dyes (ikat) are by their nature limited, shibori resists embrace an extremely flexible universe. By providing both discipline and freedom in many mediums, shibori has the potential to transform post-industrial craftsmanship.

For example, any manner of pleats -- random or precise -- can be created through automation, then pad-dyed or transfer-printed, then opened -- all without human involvement! Whether crisply defined or shadowy, the resulting pattern is as full of miniscule accidents for natural randomness as traditional shibori. Because we can perceive this marriage of liquid dyes and thirsty cloth, this "understanding of making" is a pleasure increasingly rare in an industrialized world. That this organic patterning is also three-dimensional makes it the optimal antidote to the monotony of mass production.

More recently we learned that shibori can also be used to subtract color (discharge) or fiber (burn-out) or even whole layers of cloth. We have also learned that using shibori methods for permanently pleating or shrinking cloth creates miraculous surfaces. Finally unlocking the potential of thermoplastic memory, we are using these new wrinkles to resist wrinkles, increase comfort, and widen ranges of size and fit.

Fortunately, Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada understands all this full well. She also knows the designers opening up these universes. Crescendo!

Jack Lenor Larsen

Customer Reviews

The best book that's been done about contemporary shibori
Shibori is the Japanese word for resist-dyeing. There are three shibori techniques: tie-dye (those Sixties hallucinoform tee-shirts); clamp-resist (being pressed between two boards or tied tightly around a pole), and wax-resist (batik). It is an extremely old technique, perhaps the first to impose upon cloth a pattern that wasn't woven there.

Fragments of shibori-like textiles found in Africa date from as far back as 700 BCE. Purely Japanese textiles date from the Yayoi period (200 BCE-250 ACE). Yayoi people wove garments on portable looms. The making of cloth depended not so much on the mass of the wearer's body as on how the movement of the wearer's body will determine what the loom must do. In Yayoi times weavers used portable loom that could be easily set up by tying one set of warp ends around the waist and the other to a tree. The weaver's body width fixed the width of the fabric. That most Yayoi textiles were about twelve inches wide says much about the size of the Yayois.

Japan did not embrace clothing as an expression of social delineation until the Asuka period (552-645), an era when Chinese crafts, and customs were eagerly imported. Over the centuries, surface designs became steadily more complex as garment silhouettes became steadily more simple. These tendencies merged into the kimono and have stayed there ever since. With the xenophobic policies of the Tokugawa Shogunate, all things foreign were shunned. The Japanese turned inward to their own tastes and aesthetics.

By the Edo period (1600-1868), complex layerings of color, patterns, and resist dyes all contributed to a great culmination of textile design. Into the canons of design came surface complexity ranging from colors so saturated they dazzle the eye to so subtle they are almost indistinguishable. Japanese textile art embraced a dozen or more dyeing techniques, embroidery and appliqué, painted pictures, hammered gold and silver patterns, calligraphy. Out of these chirped an aviary of decor-plum blossoms, pine boughs, flowers on trellises, rice sheaves, snowflakes, paired shells, swallowtail butterflies, quince flowers, waves, interlocked squares, medallions of chrysanthemum and wisteria and gentian, cranes, lightning, hemp leaves, scrolls of peony, woven circles, basket work, fish scales, mountains, clouds, flowing water, waves, checkerboards, circles.

In the wrong hands such a tumultuous vocabulary would end in chaos. But from the great costumes of the Noh to the hundreds of treatises on kimono design to be found in Japanese bookstores and libraries today, there always existed in the Japanese garment imagination a more fundamental quality: drama. It is no surprise to find that the garment's greatest period of elaboration came after it was adopted as the principle costume by groups of itinerant entertainers who evolved into the most enduring of Japanese theatrical styles, the Noh.

The Memory on Cloth story begins after World War II. Before the War, textiles and garments were major engines of Japan's economy-the equivalent of transistor products and autos today. The quaint, consuming, painstaking art of shibori was nearly extinct by the 1960s. Modernity-craving Japanese put their old kimonos into the tansu and bought Missoni and Prada and The Gap. Shibori's spiritual home, in Arimatsu and Narumi on Honshu island, was ignored even by the railways, which built no sidings there. Too few fabric dyers were left to fill a boxcar with goods.

But valiant was the tenacity of the industry. Arimatsu-Narumi's response was to invent. When the market for kimonos dwindled, they made neckties. Even so, by 1972, one of Japan's oldest industries had dwindled to two elderly practitioners. Then along came people like Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, one of so many artists who bootstrapped ancient crafts out of extinction by globalizing them in the same positive way that world fusion music has globalized innumerable melody forms. Shibori was turned around. Today it is an internationally recognized art form.

It also can be a vibrant modern art form. Memory on Cloth features work by artists from Africa, South America, Europe, India, Japan, China, Korea, the USA, and Australia. It encompasses fabric design, wearable art and fashion, and textile art or various sculptural forms. Described are works by more than seventy innovative designers, including Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Jurgen Lehl, Jun'ichi Arai, Helene Soubeyran, Genevieve Dion, Asha Sarabhai, Junco Sato Pollack, Ana Lisa Hedstrom, Marian Clayden, and Carter Smith. Each artist shares details on the processes they have created, making this an invaluable source of inspiration for artists in fields outside of textile design.

Japan never made a distinction between craft and art. Indeed, even in the West that demarcation arose only over the last few hundred years as a manifestation of the post-Renaissance preoccupation with individuality. In Japan the unity of art and craft was not because Japanese textile makers shunned egocentrism, but because of their tendency to focus on process more than product. The Japanese Zen garden of raked stones is Exhibit A in contemplative surrender to process.

Like so many arts that globalization salvaged at the edge of extinction, shibori inspired a modern revival laden with legend and freighted with technique. The progress of Japanese textiles is stuttery, sitting in place one moment, leaping forward the next, the artists either appropriating or inventing as chance comes calling. The result is a continually evolving collaboration between past and future. Today's mingling of synthetic and natural fibers, organics and metals, hand and machine, are in keeping with the try-anything heritage of the country's garments.

Yoshiko Wada is an endearingly good writer: lucid, logical, tight, to the point. She teaches shibori aesthetics and techniques in her home city of Berkeley, California, and around the world. Thanks to her, shibori was transported to Africa and inspired a vibrant local industry in Mali and other Sahel countries. Of her it can truly be said that the word 'shibori' is now an international currency.