mystery beyond the mountains

Mystery beyond the Mountains is the title of my Convergence yardage. I have finally got around to stitching the casement on to the back of it so that it is ready for display and I’ll be parcelling it up to send to the US next week. So, yes, this is the post where I finally “show and tell” you all about it.

Convergence doesn’t ask for a statement about the piece you submit, but I wrote one for myself to clarify all the sources and ideas in my own mind. Here it is.

---

Artist’s Statement

This piece embodies my response so far to the unexpected death of my 38-year-old brother, Matthew, in February 2009.

I knew that I wanted to express this in weaving and finally found my starting point in a documentary about Adinkra cloth, a printed cloth worn traditionally at funerals in Ghana. The motifs on the cloth are chosen by the bereaved family and all have specific meanings. In developing a woven cloth from this printed tradition I would be exploring the theme of New Visions: Ancient Paths in celebration of the life of my brother.

By combining echo weave in black and white with differential shrinkage I was able to develop a design whose contrasting areas  of light and shade also evoke the mountains of New Mexico and the southwest. The ancient cultures of this region were a source of fascination for my brother and so another aspect of his life could be woven into the cloth.

Mortality is something which all cultures have struggled to come to terms with but which remains a mystery, so I decided to call this cloth Mystery beyond the Mountains. It expresses an idea of death as a journey to a place the living cannot see and cannot reach.

---

And now to unpack this for readers who like all the gory details.

The inspiration

You can read about my brother Matthew in this post from Feb 2009 and on this tribute blog, set up by his friends.

You can read about my discovery of the Adinkra documentaries here. They are an Open University resource and freely available on the OU website or through iTunes, and I heartily recommend them. I was already quite taken with the Convergence theme of New Visions: Ancient Paths and the Adinkra cloth was the spark I needed: I actually got so excited I could hardly sleep for several days!

I loved the rawness of the colours – black, white and rust-red – contrasted with the intricate detail of the motifs. I loved the way the tradition is not fixed but that craftspeople reinterpret the symbols. I loved the great swathes of red and black cloth worn by the mourners who are shown dancing at a funeral, and I loved the people who had updated the tradition by having matching shirts and dresses made for all the family.

When I looked into it a bit more I found some directories of motifs and the meanings are both subtle and beautiful. I loved the ladder – Owuo atwedie, baako mmfo meaning “all men shall climb the ladder of death” — and spent ages knitting a white sample with little black ladders. Knitting?  Well, yes. I didn’t have the mental strength to plan even a sample warp but I could play with my foam tiles and do a bit of knitting in front of the telly.

In the end I decided that I would have to keep the design simple and focused on the diagonals of the kra pa symbol: “sanctity like a cat, abhors filth”. My brother would have laughed his astonishing and infectious laugh at the idea of being associated with sanctity, but he loved to be with cats.

The practicalities

I had been practising with echo weave in scarves, but it took me a long time and a lot of ugly samples before I decided what to do. I tried stripes of red/black and white/black, but wherever I had a white weft crossing a red warp or vice versa I got a nasty shade of pink. So I restricted the red to narrow warp stripes of merino/silk which would shrink up and give my angular design some curves.

I also spent ages dithering over the exact treadling to use. I wanted a 3/1/1/3 tie-up but it doesn’t give you the facility for exactly opposite lifts, and I wanted (i) a clean break from black to white or white to black at the change of direction and (ii) a reasonably square design where the cycle of treadling would always take me back to the same place in in the same number of lifts in either direction. Sorry that sounds a bit garbled, but I know what I mean! It led to a lot of spreadsheet time, that’s for sure.

Excel has flatly refused to copy the final draft as an image so that I can upload it: “it is too big and will be truncated”, which sounds rather unpleasant. So here is half the draft for one white/black strip — that’s about 1 ½” wide — in teeny tiny writing… not a lot of use, but a taster at least (it will get very slightly bigger if you click on it). As explained above, I didn’t actually use the red weft shown, but I needed the contrast to make sense of the diagram!

All the dithering was partly natural for me – so many possibilities and only one life, what shall I choose?? – and partly due to an ambivalence about the project. I had made the decision to do it well ahead of the brief being published. I had overseen the editing of two pieces for the Journal from UK weavers who had exhibited at Convergence 2008 and I had thought what an exciting undertaking this would be. I also felt I needed the discipline of a fixed timescale in order to get myself to weave anything at all. But I really wasn’t sure I could motivate myself to accomplish it; thus I didn’t get around to ordering the yarns I needed (the merino/silk and a lot of 10/2 and 16/2 cotton) until December and didn’t receive them until after Christmas. Not good planning for a deadline of 25^th January.

But I generally find things are much easier to do than to contemplate and once I got started it was a madhouse here. I wound, threaded and sleyed 1600+ ends for ten white/black strips bordered with red, and then wove off 64 repeats of my three-inch block, tallying them all on my notepad and cheering every 12.  25^th January was a Monday and the day the submission had to be in the post. I finished the weaving on the Friday, cut it off and put it through the washing machine (twice) on the Saturday, hung it up and photographed it on the Sunday. I wove the handling piece at the end of the warp after cutting off the yardage. I wanted it to have the same edge finish as the wider piece so I dropped the outer warp strips and wove it four blocks wide rather than the whole ten.

The photography was a ghastly experience. It was a dark grey day and we COULD NOT get the lighting right. It is a textured piece and the shadows are a crucial part of the effect. The human eye sees it so well! And yet those shadows just played havoc with my photos. Of course I had S to help so that was BOTH of us frazzled into bits after six hours (yes, six hours) of going up and down ladders, clearing floors, clearing walls, putting up battens, taking them down… I was not thrilled with the results we finally achieved but we just had to stop!

The things that surprised me most

1. The texture – it feels rather like a bath towel! The combination of the 10/2 cotton and the echo weave structure bulking up the warp make it quite thick and chunky.

2. The scale of it, and how important that is to the overall impression. It is not a very sophisticated design, but in such large quantities it manages to be pretty striking.

3. The shadows created by the differential shrinkage. I was looking for curves but I found something much more. I am so pleased with the way they evoke a mountainous landscape.

The name

I had originally intended to call the cloth Mortal Mystery, but I wanted to give credit to those mountains and their place in the mythology of so many cultures as the edge of the world of the living.

So here is Mystery beyond the Mountains: I hope these pics are clear enough.

“mystery beyond the mountains” was posted by Cally on 24 June 2010 at http://callybooker.wordpress.com