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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 recognizes 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 alongside material, colour and cloth, and make this innovative study an essential read for scholars, students, and practitioners alike.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Lesley Millar
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. The Language of Resist Dyeing
Farnham School of Art: a pedagogy in resist dyeing
Contributions to knowledge: an international perspective
The emergence of a visual and sensory language
Poetic language
The space and place of resist dyeing
Narrative language: emotional connections
The language of intangible cultural heritage
3. Movement, Motion and Time: The Formation of Practice
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
4. Material as Metaphor: Colour as Stuff
Indigo as substance
The life and death of a vat
Indigo as pigment
Indigo: burnishing and polishing
Colour as stuff
Mud: the passage of time
Minerals and matter as 'place'
Encrusted
5. Process as Performance: Repetition, Ritual, Gesture
Resist dyeing as bodily action
Observers of material flow
Performativity as material transformation
The subliming vessel
Performativity as physical and emotional experience
6. Theatres of Making: Space and Place
Memories of place
Reiko Sudo
In search of ton-byan
Hranovnica: a hiatus in time
Púchov, Slovakia
Steinberg, Austria
Signposts to the future
Kyoto, Japan
Mashiko, Japan
Tokyo, Japan
Arimatsu, Japan
Mashiko revisited
Towards a new definition for intangible cultural heritage
List of Artworks
References
Index
About the author
Linda Brassington, PhD, is an independent artist and researcher, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Churchill Trust. She has an extensive career as a practitioner and educator in printed and dyed textiles, primarily as former Senior Lecturer at UCA Farnham, UK. Her work has received awards from the British Council, Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, Pasold Research Fund, Society of Dyers and Colourists and the Dyers Company, and has contributed to the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
