Visitors to the Phinney Farmers Market last month may have noticed something especially colorful happening alongside the week’s fresh produce and local vendors. The PNA Art Club brought a Community Indigo Vat to the market, inviting neighbors to bring light-colored clothing and give it new life with indigo dye. Participants folded, twisted, bound, and compressed their fabric before dipping it in the vat. It was a fun opportunity to experiment and create together as a community. More than just giving new life to old fabric, this experience also brought to life old traditions, connecting our neighborhood to a much bigger story…
People around the world have been manipulating fabric and using dyes to create patterns for centuries. Cultures across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and elsewhere developed their own methods of folding, tying, stitching, clamping, wrapping, or otherwise preventing dye from reaching portions of a textile. Today, shibori has become an international textile term for a broad range of shape-resisted dyeing techniques. The word originates from Japanese, but similar methods of manipulating cloth to resist dye developed within many cultures, each with its own traditions, terminology, and history.
Japan: The Art of Shibori
In Japan, resist-dyeing techniques developed into a remarkably diverse textile tradition known as shibori, encompassing many different ways of shaping, binding, stitching, folding, or compressing cloth before dyeing. Kanoko shibori involves binding sections of fabric to resist the dye. Kumo “spider” shibori uses pleating and binding to create patterns resembling a spider web. Arashi “storm” shibori involves wrapping fabric around a pole, binding, and compressing it before dyeing. Itajime shibori uses folding and compression between objects to resist the dye, producing repeating geometric patterns.
West Africa: Adire and Other Indigo Traditions
Across West Africa, indigo dyeing has similarly rich and diverse traditions, with techniques varying among countries, regions, and communities. Among the Yoruba people of Nigeria, patterned resist-dyed cloth is known as adire. The name comes from Yoruba words referring to tying and dyeing. Adire oniko folds and ties fabric around objects such as stones, twigs, or sticks before being placed into indigo dye. Adire alabare uses stitching to resist the dye. After dyeing, those stitches are carefully removed to reveal intricate patterns in the cloth. Specific patterns can also carry names and meanings of their own! Pele onkika, or “scarification and fingers,” is created by rolling and hand-stitching narrow folds before dyeing. Olokun is a pattern associated with the Yoruba deity of the sea and sun bebe, or “lifting up the sun.” Traditional African indigo dyeing has also been practiced in Mali, Cameroon, Cรดte d’Ivoire, Morocco, and Tunisia, developing techniques unique to the particular communities, environments, and available natural resources.
Indonesia: Batik
Indonesia also has its celebrated tradition of batik. Unlike tying, stitching, and compression practices, batik commonly uses wax as the resist. Artisans apply wax to selected portions of the cloth, preventing dye from penetrating those areas. After the wax is applied and the cloth is dyed, removing the resist reveals the areas protected from the dye. Repeating the process with different areas covered or exposed allows artisans to build remarkably intricate designs.
One idea, many traditions
What connects these traditions isn’t one inventor or one place of origin. It’s a remarkably universal idea — what happens if we decide where the dye can’t go? Across generations and cultures, people have answered that question in extraordinarily different ways.
A pattern tells a story
That history can give us a new way to look at the pieces created at the Farmers Market. The circles, lines, bursts, and geometric shapes aren’t simply patterns painted onto the surface. They record what happened to the fabric before it entered the dye. A white line m aight show where a strong was tightly wrapped. A repeating shape might reveal how the fabric was folded. An undyed area might show where the fabric was compressed so tightly that the indigo couldn’t reach it.
Even when two people begin with the same instructions, their finished pieces can look completely different. That’s part of what has made resist dyeing such an enduring form of human creativity. A relatively simple idea can become a textile language shaped by the materials, techniques, traditions, and creativity of the people use it.
Keep exploring
Out Community Indigo Vat offered a small opportunity to experiment with a practice that connects to centuries of textile traditions around the world. There’s much more to this story than we could fit into one blog post, so if you’d like to keep exploring, here are some resources to check out:
- World Shibori Network
- Wikipedia – Adire (Textile Art)
- UNESCO – Indonesian Batik
- Indigo Shade Map – Sharing indigo’s global heritage, dyeing traditions, and stories through mapping, blogging, community education, and publications.
The PNA’S Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) Committee works to support a community where people have opportunities to learn about and celebrate the experiences, histories, and cultures represented within and beyond our neighborhood. Interested in learning more or getting involved?