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“weaving for me should be the process of transforming the weft into accumulated space replacing the vanishing of time” Chiyoko Tanaka

I found these images on these websites: http://browngrotta.com/pages/tanaka.php and http://modernistaesthetic.blogspot.com/2014/02/chiyoko-tanaka.html and  I found them crushingly beautiful.

 

They are textiles by the artist Chiyoko Tanaka whose artist’s statement includes the following:

For me the act of weaving, as the weft threads accumulate one by one, is a representation of time passing away; texture acting as the locus of the present time. Finally, a piece of fabric is the result, the existence of which I regard as the expression of my sensitivity. To be specific, weaving for me should be the process of transforming the weft into accumulated space replacing the vanishing of time. Placing the fabric on the ground, I trace out the ground texture and surface of the fabric. The act of tracing is a transformation of time coherence into space and grinding is the transformation of space coherence into time. The final color of the surface is not so important, more the effect achieved by the application of a certain soil, charcoal or choice of tool which helped translate the texture of the ground more readily into my “canvas.” The true past tense of the verb to grind, “ground,” also implies the earth, which can be used to embed, implant, erode and emboss its own surface into my work.      Chiyoko Tanaka

I  found her thinking about weaving crushingly beautiful too.  The only problem is that the notion that as the weft is placed the accumulation of fabric is replacing time is literally true and makes me feel the way I probably should have been feeling all along, i.e. this should be really good . . . this should matter . . .

I want to try in insert some of that consciousness into my weaving. It might be a hard balance for me because I also have a strong belief in the beauty of utility – that textiles should be functional and that their functionality doesn’t make them matter less.  When we weave napkins or placemats for our tables, towels for our kitchens or blankets for our beds – we are not  creating the merely utilitarian, we are creating an aesthetic environment that gives us pleasure every time we have to do the repetitive and sometimes fatiguing chores of daily life. In that sense, we are replacing time with a textile by weaving, but we are also giving ourselves moments of aesthetic joy both in the creation and in the use.   It is not exactly contradicting Tanaka’s statement – I have no idea what led Tanaka to weave art textiles rather than domestic/utilitarian textiles, but I certainly feel cowed by her art and might be a little defensive about my cup towels – poor ‘ol cup towels.