“African Studio: The photographs of Mama Casset (1908-1992) reflect a privileged moment for Senegal. They capture a bourgeoisie still distinguished by showy splendour where each detail was a mark of elegance…..”
Click the back cover below to read on.
Wonderful photos – Available now from www.revuenoire.com
If today people associate African fabrics with the bright colours of wax prints, lace, and kente, as recently as the 1960s indigo blue cloths were ubiquitous throughout much of West Africa. Indigo still dominates the stacked piles of vintage fabrics in my shop and still underlies many later developments in local textile design. Yet only a few quite isolated pockets of natural indigo production and use still remain in remote regions in West Africa itself. The personal journey of discovery that led her to investigate some of those often elusive surviving traces forms the subject of Catherine E. McKinley’s recent book Indigo: in Search of the Color that Seduced the World (Bloomsbury, 2011).
Catherine was the first person to buy a cloth from my first website back in the mid 1990s so we have been talking about indigo and I have been waiting to see this book for a long time. For me it captures both the rewards and the occasional frustrations of a long engagement with West Africa and its people as much as its textile traditions. A blend of social history, ethnography, travel, personal encounter and autobiography in a mix that is at times lyrical, at times less comfortable, it is a fine book that adds something unusual and distinctive to the literature on Africa’s textile history.
Also well worth noting for anyone interested in indigo is this new documentary film, available on DVD - Blue Alchemy: Stories of Indigo (www.newdealfilms.com) . If Catherine’s book draws our attention to the decline in indigo traditions in Africa, this beautiful film, directed by Mary Lance, looks at current attempts to revive indigo use and maintain important traditions both in Nigeria and in many other parts of the world.
For some sources this motif is a Sufi inspired spiral towards the infinite. For others it is just the moon. My focus today is just on the graphic beauty it displays. For front views and more details on these two early robes see our gallery here.
Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the opening of this important new show and the accompanying Fall Symposium at the Textile Museum. This is a beautifully presented show, with each piece carefully mounted, sensitively lit, and displayed against a restrained chocolate brown background that does justice to the artistry and variety of superb Kuba textiles on view. The wider context of Central African raffia art was shown by the inclusion of a small number of textiles from other regional traditions (more are shown in the catalogue) and by a group of fine baskets, primarily from the Tutsi and Hutu peoples of Rwanda. The Textile Museum and the curator, Vanessa Drake Moraga, are to be congratulated on this splendid exhibition.
Below is the gallery guide. Click on each image for a larger view.
The exhibition catalogue is available from the Textile Museum. Click on the image below:
Finally there is a program of events to accompany the show. Click to view.
“The Sirwa is situated at the junction of the High Atlas and the Anti Atlas mountain ranges in Morocco. The Berber weavers of the Sirwa are renowned for their wide range of textiles and their technical knowledge and artistry. In addition to embroidery and sprang (an ancient precursor of knitting), female Sirwa weavers master several weaving techniques: tapestry weaving, twinning, brocading and knotting, which they use individually or in combination. Since the 1980s weaving production has intensified, this activity occupying most of the households in the region and constituting a major livelihood option complementing subsistence agriculture.
The central piece of the exhibition will be a special 19th century cloak, the akhnif, (loaned by the British Museum) a garment unique to Morocco that has inspired the production of a new type of carpet in the 1990s, and variants since. In the exhibition, many of these richly coloured, densely embellished and painstakingly crafted carpets will be displayed. They demonstrate the dynamism and creativity of Sirwa weavers who exploit and continuously update their rich weaving tradition to produce a great variety of weavings for the international market. This will be the first exhibition dedicated to contemporary textiles production in Morocco.
Visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to watch as the Sirwa weavers demonstrate their technical skills on equipment especially brought from Morocco and can even try their own hand at weaving. They will be given the opportunity to touch many items displayed in the exhibition, to handle tools (spindles, cards and beating combs) and textures (yarns and weaving samples) and to experience the carpets.
A one-day international conference on Moroccan textiles will take place in conjunction with the exhibition. The conference will explore Moroccan textiles in their historical and social context; contemporary Moroccan textile designers and artists will present their work and creations.”
I may have more information on this in a week or two when I have had time to check it out.
Superb and dramatic Asafo company banner, made for the Number 2 Company in the village of Otuamkesi. The style suggests the banner was made around mid C20th, probably in a workshop in the village of Saltpond or Kromantse. Depicts dramatic battle scenes of decapitation and mutilation as a warning to the enemies of the Company.
These long banners are very rare - this is only the second I have collected. They were made as a public demonstration of prosperity by a wealthy Company, and the longest examples were many times larger than this. Condition is good, with minor losses to the border and two places where small tears have been sewn up. Details and more Asafo flags in our gallery here
Elephant design from a fine 1960s example of a distinctive style of Ewe cloth woven from rayon with a large variety of figurative and geometric supplementary weft float motifs on a plain background. Motifs on this chief’s ceremonial robe cloth include animals, insects, birds, umbrellas, airplanes, forks, stools, leaves etc.
Unlike the designs on most Ewe cloths, the supplementary weft float motifs on this cloth and others of the same type are not identical on both faces of the fabric. Instead the full design appears on the front and only an outline on the reverse. This is because, rather than using the second set of heddles that group warps in sets of 6 or 8 threads to create the float motifs (so the extra weft goes over 8 warps then under 8 warps etc) the weavers pick out the design by hand, moving the weft over 8 then just under one...
Normal Ewe weft float pattern woven using second set of heddles:
Hand picked “one-sided” float pattern:
According to Malika Kraamer in her PhD thesis, this technique, which was developed by coastal Ewe weavers in the early decades of the C20th, is called "asidanuvo," meaning cloth with hand picked design. In the 1970s large numbers of rayon cloths with simpler, slightly larger motifs in this style were sold for export to Congo, with the result that the style became called Congo cloth by Ewe weavers.
This is an exceptional example, probably dating from around 1960, and in excellent condition. Details, size etc, and more Ewe textiles in our gallery here
