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CONTENTS INDULGE textiles to buy, collect or simply admire 11 IRISH LIST Polly Leonard’s Celtic wish list 58 BINDING KNOTS The symbolic Nature of Forest+ Found by Ptolemy Mann, images by Dean Hearne GLOBAL textiles from around the world 16 IRISH EYE CANDY A Journey through Irish Textiles By Siobhan Corrigan 52 THE CHECKERED HISTORY OF CHECKS Contemporary African artists speak about plaid by Liese Van Der Watt ANECDOTE textiles that touch our lives 27 MISCELLANY Know Your Checks illustrated by Susy Pilgrim-Waters 28 THE SCOTTISH DRAPER Cloth takes on mythologies and a skin-like presence under the brush of Alison Watt By Dr Catherine Harper, images by Tony Buckingham 96 SWATCH Favourite Fabric no.32: Black Watch Tartan By Sarah Jane Downing, illustrated by Susy Pilgrim-Waters ATTIRE critical reporting of fashion trends 22 COST:WEAR Dressing responsibly has never been so easy By Sass Brown 62 PERENNIAL PROMISES Rebecca Carr’s seasonless clothes are designed to be worn and loved for life By Grace Warde-Aldam, images by Jim Marsden 72 REVERENTIALThe weaver Amy Revier By Grace Warde-Aldam, images by Jake Curtis 76 FASHION MADE FAIR Marcia Patmos, New York By Ellen Köhrer and Magdalena Schaffrin CONCEPT textiles in fine art 20 FLOCK OF SHEARING Brigitta Varadi explores Irish sheep markings By Eleanor Flegg 32 SLASH AND SHOW The controversial textiles of Jilli Blackwood By Jennifer Harper, images by Shannon Tuft 58 CROSSING CONTINENTS The lineage of Tartan and Madras By Sarah Jane Downing INDUSTRY from craft to commerce 16 MODERN IRISH John Hanly & Co.’s twist on traditional tweeds By Eleanor Flegg, images by Mike Bunn 24 THE GREEN CUBE The journey of Marseille Soap By Anne Laure Camilleri 51 INDUSTRIAL INSPIRATION An online resource shows Indian textile history in a new light 70 TANGLED WEB What to consider before buying ‘ethically’ By Grace Warde-Aldam 78 SHOP TALK no 1 Jane Audas shopping at Mouki Mou FLOCK OF SHEARING Brigitta Varadi explores Irish sheep markings Encounter a sheep on a narrow Irish road and it will stare at you wild-eyed before plunging away, its ragged fleece stained pink and electric blue. Half a mile on, twin lambs are freshly painted in buttercup yellow and green. The colours represent ownership – a different pattern for each farm – but in terms of the coding of sheep, this is the iceberg’s tip. As a young Hungarian felt-maker living in the north west of Ireland, Brigitta Varadi soon realised that there was more to the markings than met the eye. The sheep is an animal of interest to felt makers, and she was fascinated by the painterly quality of the colours; but information was hard to find. She was new to the country. Both she and the farmers were isolated and shy. Almost fifteen years passed. During this time Varadi’s work underwent a transformation. I wrote about her in the early years, then met her at a craft fair in 2004. I admired a cushion, crosshatched like the cobwebbed window of an Irish cottage, its expressive nature barely contained within its simple form. “You can have it,” she said. “It’s the last one. I’m not making any more cushions.” From that moment on, she would focus on her art practice. Her work had evolved and there was nothing that she could do about it, so she took a deep breath and went with it. For several years her work was in flux. She went to Finland where she exhibited translucent panels and chrysalis forms.We met again in Carrick-on-Shannon in 2013. Her work had settled and the gallery was hung with large wall-hung works, powerful felted renditions of Rorschach ink blots. “What is it?” “Well, what do you think it is?” That series, Decoding Time, was made in imported materials – merino wool, 4 SELVEDGE 20 - ipating sheep farm il. The par tic County Counc itrim , and Le land f Ire il o , Ar ts Counc ip and Ar tist in Residence Programme llowsh lpture Centre Fe Scu itrim ject was suppor ted by Le The pro . lan ith No i.net. Images by Ke ittavarad , brig lan , and Denny Do ickey McGowan , M ine Brennan llagher, Lorra ict Ga , Bened ie Moran and Brid , Tom l Ruane : Noe ers were SELVEDGE 21 p 20-21 geographic origin of genuine Marseille soap. Utterly determined to separate their traditional soaps from an overwhelming competition of cheap knock-offs, they recently applied for the PGI protection mark. The Marseille soap recipe has not changed for centuries and is amazingly simple: vegetable oils, soda, sea salt from Camargue and water. The household white cube is made from palm and copra oils; the green cube used for the skin is made from olive and copra oils. Copra oil acts as a natural foaming agent in both soaps. The exclusive Marseille process takes fourteen days to be made. Time, expertise and openair cauldrons are key elements. The five steps of saponification begin once all the ingredients have been poured into the large cauldron and gradually brought to 120°C. The chemical reaction produces soap and glycerin, the latter being washed away. The salt enables the soap to separate from the lye. The Soap Master oversees the boiling soap for ten days, tasting the paste to evaluate the remaining amount of salt and adding water to rinse the mixture.The soap paste is washed many times to remove the salt and all lye molecules, earning the soap its Extra Pur designation.All residual impurities settle at the bottom of the tank and are drained off.The paste rests for two days. The soap is then poured into large concrete vats, previously dusted with talcum powder to prevent the soap from sticking during the hardening stage. Windows are left wide open to let the mistral wind dry the soap, which takes 2-3 days. Finally, the soap is cut into 35kg blocks later sliced into bars and cubes. Soap cubes are stamped on all six sides with logos clearly stating the mandatory quality standards of the Marseille process, such as 72% d’Huile or Extra Pur, the soap-maker’s name and now UPSM. Naturally hypo-allergenic, biodegradable, fragrance and additive free, genuine Marseille soaps can replace a wide range of products. The white soap is an all time favourite for laundry, while the green cube is renowned for soothing the most sensitive skins. An old trick is to allow it to cure at home for some time. The water evaporates, thus increasing the moisterizing properties of the soap.The black soap recipe contains caustic potash instead of lye. It is a remarkable multi-purpose cleaner and a natural flea repellent quite popular with plant nurseries and farmers. ••• Anne Laure Camilleri Marius Fabre. Marius Fabre, 148 Avenue Paul Bourret, 13300 Salon-de-Provence www.marius-fabre.com p 24-25 THE SCOTTISH DRAPER Cloth takes on mythologies and a skin-like presence under the brush of Alison Watt Alison Watt’s huge-scale Butterfly tapestry was commissioned by Scottish Opera and completed at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh in 2014. There is a long and extraordinary history of European tapestry weaving that includes the portable, ceremonial and insulating ‘nomadic murals’ of the Middle Ages, those famously produced around the regions of Arras and Flanders, such as the fabulous 15th century six-part La Dame à la Licorne (The Lady and the Unicorn) stored in the Musée de Cluny, Paris, the ecstatic Jean Lurçat tapestries in Aubusson, and those still made at the Gobelins factory, and celebrated throughout the world through, for example, the International Tapestry Network (ITNET). And of course tapestry is rooted in mythologies and arachnologies such as that of Penelope, faithful wife of Odysseus, who weaves her shroud by day and unravels it by night. For two decades she keeps unwanted suitors at bay by that weave-unravel repetition, until her husband returns from the Trojan War and his accursed wanderings. Or of Ariadne, wife of the Greek god Dionysus, who uses her red tapestry thread to lead Theseus – with whom she has fallen in love – safely to the labyrinth’s sacrificial centre and then safely out again. Watt’s Butterfly owes much of its provenance to that long history before, and to the equally lengthy tradition of the creation of flat ‘cartoons’ – from which to weave the required image and the simple stuff of cloth – that informs textile sensibility and practice. But Alison Watt is a Scottish painter in oils rather than a tapestry weaver, with a strong fundament in portraiture and nudes, in which fabric is either accompanying and adorning the human – often female – body (as in her Disposition of Linen of 1992) or the flesh itself has the textile quality of a flour bag; off-whitish, weep-puffy, bed-crumpled and silently sagging (as in Pears of 1994). It was into these primary non-woven works that Watt further introduced her depictions of painted cloth, culminating in the production of twelve very large-scale painted renditions of draped fabric, without bodies or firmament, collectively titled Shift (2000). Not only did drapery, sags and fabric folds then become the key subject for her paintings as in the oil on canvas Oblique (2004), leaving behind bodies or portraiture: these two-dimensional works then further developed outwards from their original flat canvas fabric substrates, to become of three-dimensional fabric artefact significance as Watt also began to produce linen-bound books to accompany her exhibited paintings. The folds, drapes, rumples and ruches of whitish toned fabric in Watt’s paintings have a dusty plaster feel, akin to the schematic, formulaic or sculptural forms of ancient Greek and Roman statuary, and aligned with the confusions and complexities of the baroque and the classical that Gen Doy evocatively discusses in her Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture (2001). Leonardo da Vinci’s expressive semi-clothed male nudes, Christo’s gargantuan Wrapped Reichstag, and the larger, decorative and grand cloth arrangements of the post-Renaissance are also conjured. But there is a decidedly bodily softness in the dusty monochromes that is reminiscent of a more tenderly human skin quality that even breathes the sensation of aged, doughy, powdery, wrinkly skin into the paintings. They are poignantly suggestive of action before and actions afterwards, even while portraying the perverse absence of body that draped cloth on its own reveals. There is coquetry, ambiguity and taboo also at play in Alison Watt’s work, where draped white fabric hints in its folds of darker, private parts, reminding the viewer of the fascination of a curving cleavage, a shadow of dark hair glimpsed between lily thighs, or even of milky virgin labia that should never be seen. The tantalising and knowing sexualty in Watt’s paintings is about both the promise of disclosure and the failure of the disclosed, and considering the massive scale of Watt’s Phantom exhibition, there is an additional dimension that calls into question the relationship between the apparently diminutive viewer and the enveloping pillows, ghostly fluidities, and majestic dramas of these huge folds and drapes. So for me,Watt transcends an interest in the fabric itself and takes us into a physiologically affective territory that may prove unsettling and uncanny, familiar and unfamiliar, disconcerting and even just plain odd. ingham The Butterfly tapestry for Scottish Opera, in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, continues the interest 4 Tony Buck SELVEDGE 28 SELVEDGE 29 p 28-29 CONVERSATIONAL CHAIRS Bokja bring Lebanese craftsmanship and politics to the fore SELVEDGE 36 Left: Baroudi and Hibri sorting through textiles at the Bokja atelier located in Beirut, Lebanon Below: Flower Power sofa, the permanent collection of the Centre nationale des arts plastiques in Paris. How best to tell a story? How best to share a memory? Words? Pictures? Smell? Sound? Anyone who has seen any of Bokja’s exquisite pieces of upholstered furniture would, I’m sure, add textiles to this list. Across the Arab world, a bokja is an embellished textile wrapping to carry personal belongings. It is often used to hold a bride’s dowry – gifts from the women in her family wishing her a happy future. Fittingly, Bokja is also the name of Beirutbased surface fabrication studio, co-founded by Hoda Baroudi and Maria Hibri, in 2000. Their signature approach has an international following – pieces of previously used fabric, each with its own history, carefully joined together and upholstered onto often classic pieces of furniture, which find themselves transformed from one life to the next by the unexpected, brilliant juxtapositions of colour, pattern, texture and surface . Each piece is a one-off and comes with its own passport, listing its name, ‘date of birth’ and description – the start of its new journey. Baroudi and Hibri work with a wide range of local craftspeople, drawing on centuries of knowledge, often undocumented and passed down through first-hand experience. Each piece demands different skills and knowledge of the application of these in different sequences. Fundamentally and importantly, being involved in the realisation of a piece enables these specialist craftspeople to apply their knowledge and skills in a contemporary rather than a traditional context. In an interview published in Vogue Living in Nov/Dec 2010, Baroudi said, “We collaborate with artisans who use their hands, and our mission is to help those people and to make these handicrafts last.” Part of Bokja’s raison d’être is exactly this – 4 SELVEDGE 37 p 36-37 SELVEDGE 4
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THE CHECKERED HISTORY OF CHECKS Contemporary African artists speak about plaid In 2007 Marc Jacobs’s Spring/Summer collection for Louis Vuitton sported a version of the cheap nylon blue, red and white checkered bags that has become a familiar sight at train stations, airports and borders around the world. These ubiquitous bags are made in China and while some speculated that Vuitton’s version was made of leather, it nevertheless looked exactly like the genuine article, printed with a huge Louis Vuitton passport-style stamp for this occasion. These bags may have been included innocently enough to remind the audience that Louis Vuitton has always been in the business of “bags and trunks” as the stamp proclaimed, but in a prevailing climate of xenophobia, refugeeism, migrancy and displacement, these bags have become shorthand for the dispossessed and the unwanted. Its various nicknames – Polen or Türken Koffer in Germany, Zimbabwe-bags in South Africa, Guyanese Samsonite in Trinidad, Bangladeshi bags in England, Ghana-must-go-bags in West Africa – speak to ongoing histories of expulsion and temporary residence. As a result, Marc Jacob’s chutzpah to repurpose a mass product for a luxury brand, seemed to many like a callous act of cannibalistic appropriation. The blogosphere erupted, especially in West Africa where these bags have long been associated with forced expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria in the early 1980s, filled with whatever possessions the banished were able to pack in the few days they were given to get out. One anonymous commentator opined that Louis Vuitton’s appropriation of the bag is another “colonial invasion rip-off saga”, but many pointed out that these bags are not the property of Africans – they are made in China and therefore do not have the same status as something like Ashanti Kente cloth from southern Ghana. As Korateng Ofusah-Ahmaah, a popular blogger of iew irstv F SELVEDGE 52 Ghanaian descent, concluded, “slumming is a trope in the rarefied heights of haute couture”; the whole debate was a “tempest in a tea pot”. Since 2007, the plaid design of these bags has been re-used repeatedly; in Celine’s Winter 2010 collection, and just this June German designer Chris Rehberger launched The Standard bag, a goat-skin version he describes as, “the last bag you will ever need.” These debates are interesting not because of the issue of cultural ownership, but rather because they highlight the inability of an industry devoted to consumerism and capitalism to simultaneously articulate a critical stance. The sight of this familiar pattern in a luxury store or on the catwalk provokes a certain discomfort, not because of where these bags originated or to whom they belong, but due to the much more sobering fact that, as Korateng put it, these “utility bags designate immigrants, refugees or those down on their luck. They are emblems of hardship, relative poverty and exigency.” This is an aspect that sits uneasily in the world of fashion, despite fashion houses’ best attempts to decontextualize these bags as mere decorative inspiration. In contemporary art, however, and especially in the hands of a number of contemporary African artists, these bags have consistently been invoked to articulate the dislocation and discomfort that life in contemporary Africa often entails. In 2004 artist Senam Okudzeto collaged intimate portraits from her own history onto these inexpensive plaid bags, re-telling the story of her childhood that included histories of sudden exile and the way in which “the boundaries that meant nothing in pre-colonial past, now loom large in Africa.” 4 SELVEDGE 53 p 52-53 practice are used by Booth to dye the cloth she then quilts – she explains that the natural tannins found in different types of wood can create an array of delicate tones, from black and grey to soft purples. This, combined with various metal alums to fix the dye, also adds colour variations; copper salt will achieve a different tone to iron salt for example. She favours unbleached calico as her base fabric – the prototype fabric preferred by fashion designers – and elevating this simple cloth to a new status appeals to her. “The wood dyes create a leather effect on the cloth; they give it an unusual depth.” Her quilts have a simple gravitas; strong graphic motifs based around traditional quilting techniques reflecting chevrons, scallops, crosses and triangles. Machine pieced and then hand-quilted using English waxed linen thread, they often express the tonal subtleties of the natural dyes. Her next self-taught skill will be weaving and a small loom has already been erected in the studio to learn on. Their deliberately naive approach is brave, particularly now, when an over emphasis is often placed on how much training many craft-based makers have or require; but it’s exactly their naivety which makes their work interesting. They want their objects to result from their own personal experience. Rigorous thought and intuitive making are the backbone to their work. Bainbridge has focused on wood as his material and is attracted to the archetypal quality of vessels, functional and primal. Carefully hand carving useful kitchen tools and finessing his newly-found wood turning skills, he is able to put his fine art training with threedimensional forms to good use. In close contact with the forestry commission at Epping Forest, he works with wood salvaged from there, reinforcing their ‘make do’ philosophy; of course the name ‘Forest + Found’ illustrates what they do perfectly. Committed to integrity and longevity, Bainbridge and Booth have created a collection of elegant objects, which they sell via their own online shop and through various other outlets.When asked about the process of living and working together they laugh and explain that they maintain a healthy criticism towards each other’s work.They focus on objectivity and honesty – finding that this helps keep new ideas in perspective. Both are prone to delving deeply into a new idea, running away with it for weeks, only to discover they have veered too far off track. Luckily they have each other’s perspective to rely on and filter out the good ideas from the bad. f The Future Kept. Jeska Hearne o Dean & The natural limitations of urban living mean space and resources are restricted and I can’t help thinking this is challenging in terms of their creativity. A city like London offers many opportunities and Bainbridge and Booth have worked hard in the last few years to integrate themselves into their local Walthamstow community (interestingly this doesn’t always happen in rural communities). Yes, it’s important that these objects really function and yet they must sit equally well on a shelf and be looked at and appreciated for their visual beauty. It turns out Instagram is an excellent platform to express this multifaceted working practice; from their corner of Walthamstow they can project ideas across the world, and what inspiring ideas they are. ••• Ptolemy Mann www.forest-and-found.com p 60-61 PERENNIAL PROMISES Rebecca Carr’s seasonless clothes are designed to be worn and loved for life Is it craft, fine art or fashion? There seems to be an ever growing cohort of young, educated politically and socially engaged designers who are blurring distinctions, eschewing big brands and putting (both local and global) community values before commercial norms. From Rebecca Carr’s studio and shop space at Kiosk Projects in York, the juxtaposition between her early 20th century workwear style and her modern, quality-led approach to making clothes is both refreshing and revealing of what seems to be a new and flourishing approach to making. For such a young brand your aesthetic and ethos seem very self assured. Have you always been drawn to simple utilitarian design? I have always been interested in utilitarian design, how such a simple object can derive from such complex workings or ideas. On my foundation and my degree I was drawn to the mantra that form follows function, allowing what is needed to inform the way something is created. Yet, we ask a lot more from clothing than we do of other objects: where a cup might be for drinking (put most simply), clothing will always suggest a person’s social, artistic expression, and so often the ‘function’ cannot be clearly identified. I have reached a point where my work has a sense of clarity and refinement: where a piece might be described as simple, or utilitarian, this does not mean that there is no substance to the design or attention to detail – in fact quite the opposite. Many pieces have developed over time and have been a constant feature in my collections: patterns have morphed and changed as I constantly attempt to clarify and mature shapes, processes and concepts – a ‘slow game’ that I enjoy and that will continue. SELVEDGE 62 Would you say that your designs are influenced by the materials and making methods you use or the other way around? I often think about a quote from Josef Albers: “At the beginning the material stands alone.” As a designer, and more importantly as a maker I think a deep understanding of, and respect for your materials, is of utmost importance. When I think about making clothing, I begin firstly with the cloth, I think about drape, form and structure – I think so carefully about the object that I am going to be putting into the world, and why or if it is important that I make it. I think about what is to be taken away when I lay out the patterns, what can be used in the pile of remnants that is created – the negative space from a jacket, the ‘waste’. As designers we have a responsibility to ensure that the work we produce has integrity and a real meaning or necessity to it – this is why I make to order, and why I try to keep the collections concise and minimal. The way I design and make is directly influenced by the context in which I am making – the political situation, environmental circumstance, economics, and my personal status. The methods and processes that I use are influenced by the studio-shop environment, where I often need to be on the shop floor. Increasingly I use hand stitch for all detailing, slowing the making process down. Given your pieces are so traditional and simple whilst also being unisex and open to so many, would you say uniforms and concepts of uniformity are something you think about? I am certainly interested in uniforms and multiples, the simplicity and quality that you need from uniform design. I am drawn to the aesthetic of Japanese4 p 62-63 COST:WEAR Dressing responsibly has never been so easy Left; Christine MAYER. Peace Collection The average UK citizen purchases half their body weight in clothing a year, and has twenty-two items of clothing languishing unworn in the back of their wardrobe. You can purchase a summer dress from a high street chain for less than a night at the cinema, a cocktail at the bar, or a late night take-out. How did we get from our mothers’ generation, who would spend three months wages on a coat that had to last a dozen years, to the current three year average lifespan of a piece of clothing? We’ve moved from skilled local tailors and family owned businesses making to order, to global multinationals with billions of pounds in revenue, and millions of products, produced thousands of miles away, and discarded as easily as last night’s pizza. The disposability of clothing has altered our value system, and the role that clothing plays in our lives; from a considered purchase that we cared for and mended, to a one-night stand with a cheap outfit.We have lost our respect for materials: in part because the skills once needed to produce them have been devalued and shipped overseas, along with our material connection to the clothing in our lives. Fast fashion is produced at a cost not seen by the consumer, but experienced by the producers and by the environment.The ethical alternative, however, has gained a bad name over the years. It’s been pegged first as crunchy, then boring and basic, and now elitist and expensive. But it doesn’t have to be any of those things – although just like mainstream fashion, it can be. Inevitably it does cost more to do business ethically; that's just a reality when you treat people and planet fairly. However, a whole range of ethical designers have found ways of challenging the traditional system, from making more conscious material choices, to production methods, alternative pricing models and selling directly to the consumer. We need to change our relationship with clothing, from a form of cheap entertainment to one of investment. And the maths on the cost to wear ratio supports the notion of better value from the investment in clothing, rather than a cheap throw away item bought on a whim. So who are the brands that are challenging the system of fashion? Thankfully they are many and diverse, and spread all over the world.There are designers simply following established methods of manufacture, making garments from scratch one at a time with quality materials designed to last a lifetime, like Dosa and Universal Utility. Or Seline Giorgi, a Milanese artist who uses clothing to express her art and creates poetry from fabric, fibre and yarn. Like others making a contemporary mark through tradition, Seline works with time-honoured techniques like hand-felting. With its roots in a variety of different cultures around the world – it used to be relegated to books on craft traditions and your grandmother’s tea cosies! – felting has been reinvented as a contemporary, stylish technique now, thanks to the likes of Christine Birkle, Vilte, Anita Hirlekar and Carmen Eva, to name just a few. The range of designers re-contextualizing traditional craftsmanship, through sophisticated design, has grown exponentially, and incorporates crafts not previously considered for fashion. Reincarnated Soles is one such brand, who produce an uber stylish shoe collection with hand-carved platforms. 4 p 66-67 COHABIT stunning interiors beautifully photographed 42 HAND TO DIGITAL,VIRTUAL TO PHYSICAL The Making of Emma Jeffs by Corinne Julius 70 CONVERSATIONAL CHAIRS Bokja bring Lebanese craftsmanship and politics to the fore By Amanda Bright EVENTS dates for your diary London Design Festival, Country in the City: London’s Underground artists Polly Leonard in conversation 20 September, 11am at the V&A, Cromwell Rd, London SW7 2RL London Design Biennale Back to the Future: sustainability in contemporary textile production Polly Leonard in conversation 24 September, 4pm at Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA Wool Symposium in collaboration with the British Wool Marketing Board’s Campaign for wool, 14 October, 10 - 4pm, at the Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AT WIN gifts and offers for our readers 80 SUBSCRIPTION OFFERS A John Hanly & Co wool throw worth £50 for every three-year subscriber 83 READERS OFFERS THIS ISSUE A chance to win a Volga Linen tablecloth, Blodwen Pinwheel blanket and a shaggy dog cushion from Mourne Textiles INFORM the latest news, reviews and exhibition listings 03 BIAS /CONTRIBUTORS A letter from the founder, Polly Leonard, and comments from our contributors 07 NEWS After Parkinson, Edit/16, St Judes, Timorous Beasties, Kheyameya, Stig Lindberg, Front Rugs. 09 HOUSE OF CLOTH Indigo 82 BACK ISSUES Complete your collection while you still can! Many issues are sold out or have limited stock. All issues available for digital download. 84 READ Textiles of the Banjara: Cloth and Culture of a Wandering Tribe; Charlotte Kwon and Tim McLaughlin, reviewed by Sonia Ashmore. Indian Cotton Textiles: Seven Centuries of Chintz from the Karun Thakar Collection read by John Guy and Karun Thakar, reviewed by Sonia Ashmore 86 VIEW Fashioning a Reign: 90 Years of Style from The Queen's Wardrobe, Buckingham Palace, Palace of Hollyroodhouse,Windsor Castle reviewed by Deirdre McSharry. Manus x Machina – Fashion in an Age of Technology, Metropolitan Museum of Art, reviewed by Marie O’Mahony. Kate Malone: Inspired by Waddesdon reviewed by Corinne Julius. Fashion Forward, trois siècles de mode, 1715-2015, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, reviewed by Gay Appleby-Rogers 95 COMING NEXT The Decorative Issue: Elaborate textiles to thrill SELVEDGE ('selnid3 ) n. 1. finished differently 2. the non-fraying edge of a length of woven fabric. [: from SELF + EDGE] SELVEDGE 5

CONTENTS

INDULGE textiles to buy, collect or simply admire 11 IRISH LIST Polly Leonard’s Celtic wish list 58 BINDING KNOTS The symbolic Nature of Forest+ Found by Ptolemy Mann, images by Dean Hearne

GLOBAL textiles from around the world 16 IRISH EYE CANDY A Journey through Irish Textiles By Siobhan Corrigan 52 THE CHECKERED HISTORY OF CHECKS Contemporary African artists speak about plaid by Liese Van Der Watt

ANECDOTE textiles that touch our lives 27 MISCELLANY Know Your Checks illustrated by Susy Pilgrim-Waters 28 THE SCOTTISH DRAPER Cloth takes on mythologies and a skin-like presence under the brush of Alison Watt By Dr Catherine Harper, images by Tony Buckingham 96 SWATCH Favourite Fabric no.32: Black Watch Tartan By Sarah Jane Downing, illustrated by Susy Pilgrim-Waters

ATTIRE critical reporting of fashion trends 22 COST:WEAR Dressing responsibly has never been so easy By Sass Brown 62 PERENNIAL PROMISES Rebecca Carr’s seasonless clothes are designed to be worn and loved for life By Grace Warde-Aldam, images by Jim Marsden 72 REVERENTIALThe weaver Amy Revier By Grace Warde-Aldam, images by Jake Curtis 76 FASHION MADE FAIR Marcia Patmos, New York By Ellen Köhrer and Magdalena Schaffrin

CONCEPT textiles in fine art 20 FLOCK OF SHEARING Brigitta Varadi explores Irish sheep markings By Eleanor Flegg 32 SLASH AND SHOW The controversial textiles of Jilli Blackwood By Jennifer Harper, images by Shannon Tuft 58 CROSSING CONTINENTS The lineage of Tartan and Madras By Sarah Jane Downing

INDUSTRY from craft to commerce 16 MODERN IRISH John Hanly & Co.’s twist on traditional tweeds By Eleanor Flegg, images by Mike Bunn 24 THE GREEN CUBE The journey of Marseille Soap By Anne Laure Camilleri 51 INDUSTRIAL INSPIRATION An online resource shows Indian textile history in a new light 70 TANGLED WEB What to consider before buying ‘ethically’ By Grace Warde-Aldam 78 SHOP TALK no 1 Jane Audas shopping at Mouki Mou

FLOCK OF SHEARING Brigitta Varadi explores Irish sheep markings

Encounter a sheep on a narrow Irish road and it will stare at you wild-eyed before plunging away, its ragged fleece stained pink and electric blue. Half a mile on, twin lambs are freshly painted in buttercup yellow and green. The colours represent ownership – a different pattern for each farm – but in terms of the coding of sheep, this is the iceberg’s tip. As a young Hungarian felt-maker living in the north west of Ireland, Brigitta Varadi soon realised that there was more to the markings than met the eye. The sheep is an animal of interest to felt makers, and she was fascinated by the painterly quality of the colours; but information was hard to find. She was new to the country. Both she and the farmers were isolated and shy.

Almost fifteen years passed. During this time Varadi’s work underwent a transformation. I wrote about her in the early years, then met her at a craft fair in 2004. I admired a cushion, crosshatched like the cobwebbed window of an Irish cottage, its expressive nature barely contained within its simple form. “You can have it,” she said. “It’s the last one. I’m not making any more cushions.” From that moment on, she would focus on her art practice. Her work had evolved and there was nothing that she could do about it, so she took a deep breath and went with it. For several years her work was in flux. She went to Finland where she exhibited translucent panels and chrysalis forms.We met again in Carrick-on-Shannon in 2013. Her work had settled and the gallery was hung with large wall-hung works, powerful felted renditions of Rorschach ink blots. “What is it?” “Well, what do you think it is?” That series, Decoding Time, was made in imported materials – merino wool, 4

SELVEDGE 20

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SELVEDGE 21

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geographic origin of genuine Marseille soap. Utterly determined to separate their traditional soaps from an overwhelming competition of cheap knock-offs, they recently applied for the PGI protection mark.

The Marseille soap recipe has not changed for centuries and is amazingly simple: vegetable oils, soda, sea salt from Camargue and water. The household white cube is made from palm and copra oils; the green cube used for the skin is made from olive and copra oils. Copra oil acts as a natural foaming agent in both soaps. The exclusive Marseille process takes fourteen days to be made. Time, expertise and openair cauldrons are key elements. The five steps of saponification begin once all the ingredients have been poured into the large cauldron and gradually brought to 120°C. The chemical reaction produces soap and glycerin, the latter being washed away. The salt enables the soap to separate from the lye. The Soap Master oversees the boiling soap for ten days, tasting the paste to evaluate the remaining amount of salt and adding water to rinse the mixture.The soap paste is washed many times to remove the salt and all lye molecules, earning the soap its Extra Pur designation.All residual impurities settle at the bottom of the tank and are drained off.The paste rests for two days.

The soap is then poured into large concrete vats, previously dusted with talcum powder to prevent the soap from sticking during the hardening stage. Windows are left wide open to let the mistral wind dry the soap, which takes 2-3 days. Finally, the soap is cut into 35kg blocks later sliced into bars and cubes. Soap cubes are stamped on all six sides with logos clearly stating the mandatory quality standards of the

Marseille process, such as 72% d’Huile or Extra Pur, the soap-maker’s name and now UPSM.

Naturally hypo-allergenic, biodegradable, fragrance and additive free, genuine Marseille soaps can replace a wide range of products. The white soap is an all time favourite for laundry, while the green cube is renowned for soothing the most sensitive skins. An old trick is to allow it to cure at home for some time. The water evaporates, thus increasing the moisterizing properties of the soap.The black soap recipe contains caustic potash instead of lye. It is a remarkable multi-purpose cleaner and a natural flea repellent quite popular with plant nurseries and farmers. ••• Anne Laure Camilleri Marius Fabre. Marius Fabre, 148 Avenue Paul Bourret, 13300 Salon-de-Provence www.marius-fabre.com p 24-25

THE SCOTTISH DRAPER

Cloth takes on mythologies and a skin-like presence under the brush of Alison Watt

Alison Watt’s huge-scale Butterfly tapestry was commissioned by Scottish Opera and completed at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh in 2014. There is a long and extraordinary history of European tapestry weaving that includes the portable, ceremonial and insulating ‘nomadic murals’ of the Middle Ages, those famously produced around the regions of Arras and Flanders, such as the fabulous 15th century six-part La Dame à la Licorne (The Lady and the Unicorn) stored in the Musée de Cluny, Paris, the ecstatic Jean Lurçat tapestries in Aubusson, and those still made at the Gobelins factory, and celebrated throughout the world through, for example, the International Tapestry Network (ITNET).

And of course tapestry is rooted in mythologies and arachnologies such as that of Penelope, faithful wife of Odysseus, who weaves her shroud by day and unravels it by night. For two decades she keeps unwanted suitors at bay by that weave-unravel repetition, until her husband returns from the Trojan War and his accursed wanderings. Or of Ariadne, wife of the Greek god Dionysus, who uses her red tapestry thread to lead Theseus – with whom she has fallen in love – safely to the labyrinth’s sacrificial centre and then safely out again.

Watt’s Butterfly owes much of its provenance to that long history before, and to the equally lengthy tradition of the creation of flat ‘cartoons’ – from which to weave the required image and the simple stuff of cloth – that informs textile sensibility and practice.

But Alison Watt is a Scottish painter in oils rather than a tapestry weaver, with a strong fundament in portraiture and nudes, in which fabric is either accompanying and adorning the human – often female – body (as in her Disposition of Linen of 1992) or the flesh itself has the textile quality of a flour bag; off-whitish, weep-puffy, bed-crumpled and silently sagging (as in Pears of 1994).

It was into these primary non-woven works that Watt further introduced her depictions of painted cloth, culminating in the production of twelve very large-scale painted renditions of draped fabric, without bodies or firmament, collectively titled Shift (2000). Not only did drapery, sags and fabric folds then become the key subject for her paintings as in the oil on canvas Oblique (2004), leaving behind bodies or portraiture: these two-dimensional works then further developed outwards from their original flat canvas fabric substrates, to become of three-dimensional fabric artefact significance as Watt also began to produce linen-bound books to accompany her exhibited paintings.

The folds, drapes, rumples and ruches of whitish toned fabric in Watt’s paintings have a dusty plaster feel, akin to the schematic, formulaic or sculptural forms of ancient Greek and Roman statuary, and aligned with the confusions and complexities of the baroque and the classical that Gen Doy evocatively discusses in her Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture (2001). Leonardo da Vinci’s expressive semi-clothed male nudes, Christo’s gargantuan Wrapped Reichstag, and the larger, decorative and grand cloth arrangements of the post-Renaissance are also conjured. But there is a decidedly bodily softness in the dusty monochromes that is reminiscent of a more tenderly human skin quality that even breathes the sensation of aged, doughy, powdery, wrinkly skin into the paintings. They are poignantly suggestive of action before and actions afterwards, even while portraying the perverse absence of body that draped cloth on its own reveals.

There is coquetry, ambiguity and taboo also at play in Alison Watt’s work, where draped white fabric hints in its folds of darker, private parts, reminding the viewer of the fascination of a curving cleavage, a shadow of dark hair glimpsed between lily thighs, or even of milky virgin labia that should never be seen. The tantalising and knowing sexualty in Watt’s paintings is about both the promise of disclosure and the failure of the disclosed, and considering the massive scale of Watt’s Phantom exhibition, there is an additional dimension that calls into question the relationship between the apparently diminutive viewer and the enveloping pillows, ghostly fluidities, and majestic dramas of these huge folds and drapes.

So for me,Watt transcends an interest in the fabric itself and takes us into a physiologically affective territory that may prove unsettling and uncanny, familiar and unfamiliar, disconcerting and even just plain odd.

ingham

The Butterfly tapestry for Scottish Opera, in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, continues the interest 4 Tony Buck

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CONVERSATIONAL CHAIRS Bokja bring Lebanese craftsmanship and politics to the fore

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Left: Baroudi and Hibri sorting through textiles at the Bokja atelier located in Beirut, Lebanon Below: Flower Power sofa, the permanent collection of the Centre nationale des arts plastiques in Paris.

How best to tell a story? How best to share a memory? Words? Pictures? Smell? Sound? Anyone who has seen any of Bokja’s exquisite pieces of upholstered furniture would, I’m sure, add textiles to this list. Across the Arab world, a bokja is an embellished textile wrapping to carry personal belongings. It is often used to hold a bride’s dowry – gifts from the women in her family wishing her a happy future. Fittingly, Bokja is also the name of Beirutbased surface fabrication studio, co-founded by Hoda Baroudi and Maria Hibri, in 2000. Their signature approach has an international following – pieces of previously used fabric, each with its own history, carefully joined together and upholstered onto often classic pieces of furniture, which find themselves transformed from one life to the next by the unexpected, brilliant juxtapositions of colour, pattern, texture and surface . Each piece is a one-off and comes with its own passport, listing its name, ‘date of birth’ and description – the start of its new journey.

Baroudi and Hibri work with a wide range of local craftspeople, drawing on centuries of knowledge, often undocumented and passed down through first-hand experience. Each piece demands different skills and knowledge of the application of these in different sequences. Fundamentally and importantly, being involved in the realisation of a piece enables these specialist craftspeople to apply their knowledge and skills in a contemporary rather than a traditional context. In an interview published in Vogue Living in Nov/Dec 2010, Baroudi said, “We collaborate with artisans who use their hands, and our mission is to help those people and to make these handicrafts last.” Part of Bokja’s raison d’être is exactly this – 4

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