Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Livin' dye
A lot of love and
By Nadine Kam
exotic ingredients go
into the making of
organic indigo
Star-BulletinSUCH is the mystery of indigo that legend has it that the urine of young boys was used in the process of making the dye in ancient Japan.
"I don't know about that," said artist Reiko Mochinaga Brandon, "but it is a very mysterious thing, so there are a lot of interesting stories about it.
"People feed their dye all kinds of things like wine, sake, honey, brown sugar. A lot of the indigo dyers in Japan treat their dye pots like human beings. They say, 'Today my indigo is happy,' 'today it's pouty' or 'it's hungry.' It's a really fascinating, magical world."
The urine tale may have originated from the fact that the indigo fermentation process creates ammonia. Japanese farmers wore indigo-dyed garments, not only because they were durable and the dark colors hid dirt, but because they believed the ammonia smell kept insects away, she said.
ON EXHIBIT
What: "Blue and White: Recent Works by Reiko Mochinaga Brandon"
Her own work -- on view at The Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center -- doesn't require raiding the sugar bowl, or another familiar bowl. She's combined ancient technique with more contemporary materials and makes no apologies for the blend.
"I don't do strictly traditional. I've tried it and it's wonderful for research, but it's not practical."
In one of her installations, "Congregation," the simplicity and calm of four kimonos facing east, west, north and south form a shrine and give only subtle hints of the intense labor and heartache that went into their creation. Each element represents knowledge gleaned over 20 years.
Brandon, who is curator of textiles at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, became interested in indigo in the '80s, while working on her first major exhibition for the museum, "The Art of Tsutsugaki (Japanese Country Textiles)." Artists would use tsutso, a conelike tool, to draw on fabric with rice paste as a baker might ice a cake. When the fabric was dipped in indigo dye, the paste resisted color.
Her research led her to Japan, where she observed traditional methods of making the dye. Stems and leaves from the indigo plant are harvested, composted and eventually used to create a highly concentrated paste called sukumo. Warm water, ash and sugars or liquors of choice are added for fermentation.The dye, kept at a pH of 10 or 11 (water has a pH of 7), is stirred a couple of times a day, for two or three days, with temperatures set at a toasty 77 to 95 degrees.
"If it's too cold, it won't work, and you have to feed the bacteria system or it won't do anything. It'll die on you," she said.
"Of course I don't go through all that. Here, I'll use the natural indigo, but I also use synthetic in powder form."
Even without making the dye herself, her friends consider her a little crazy for sewing all the kimono by hand, then using labor-intensive techniques, such as shibori, stitching by hand the areas of resist on the kimonos.
White horses -- sacred in the Shinto religion -- on the kimonos prance and glow white with rays that form in the folds left by the tightly cinched stitches.
"Shibori usually features geometric or simple patterns, but I really wanted to do these pictorial images and it's very hard to accomplish this. That's why people think it's insane to create something that they think can be accomplished some other way."
Another problem was that she didn't take into account how much the indigo-dyeing process changes the character of the fabric.
"When I opened it, the huge wonderful horse I drew shrunk, so my lovely horse became a pony."In subsequent attempts, she drew the legs longer to compensate. They still shrunk, but she says, "I think they're OK. Always, something unexpected happens."
The dyeing process, too, required dipping the fabric into the dye several times to get the saturated blue. This has to be done evenly to avoid getting lines of demarcation.Brandon uses a 30-gallon garbage can for the task.
"I never left the cloth in the dye for more than one second; it was continuously up, down."
Exposure to air is important, she said. "When you remove the fabric from the dye, the first color you see is green, then it oxidizes; it turns pale blue.
"It's hard to dye up to an even blue. People think that's probably the easiest, but it's very easy to make patterns and different shadings.
"Unless you know this craft, you don't know what the artist goes through. But for me, this is a very therapeutic process. I can have a busy day, all day, and come home and work for a couple of hours, simply dipping cloth," she said, her voice sounding at peace. "It's very mundane, but it's very beautiful."
The other two pieces in the show are "Paperfall," a cascade comprising 180 sheets of indigo-dyed paper, and "Floating Squares," lengths of linen bathed in indigo fading from blue to white, in which individual threads have been removed to create a grid pattern accented by gold-leaf squares.
Working with historic textiles keeps her challenged.
"I'm impressed, I'm amazed, I'm flabbergasted when I see these pieces. Oh, my goodness, someone as crazy as me!
"But they used tedious techniques to create in a different era, when they had time to do those things. The crazy thing about my work is that I do it in Hawaii in the 21st century, when no one has that kind of time.
"That's why I say it's therapeutic. And it's not that I don't feel frustrated. It's often a struggle when you try this, try that, and you can't get the result you want or plan. Then I feel like I'm wasting time.
"But I've been doing this for a long time, and when you keep at it, don't give up, at some point you will find some result, like enlightenment, and that moment is so wonderful."
Click for online
calendars and events.
