Yesterday I gave two short circular textile printing workshops at the DWGWD festival, a Dutch sustainability festival for everyone who wants to take action to reduce climate change. The festival took place at BlueCity, the circular hub in Rotterdam. In this workshop - which I hosted together with my Living Colour partner-in-design Ilfa Siebenhaar - we taught participants how to dye and print fabrics and paper with natural pigments from waste streams.
TATAKI-ZOMÉ FROM WASTE STREAMS
Tataki-Zomé (たたき染め) is a traditonal Japanese method of transferring leaves and flowers onto fabric or paper. It is a form of nature printing, but instead of using inks or paints, tataki-zomé uses the colours of the plant itself. In English this technique is often called "flower pounding".
We gathered the flowers over the course of 2 weeks from the market and florists who could not sell these anymore, because the flowers wilted or they had snapped at the stems. The cotton I sourced was either end of roll or had stains from water damage, which I was able to wash out.
NATURAL COLOUR MANIPULATION
We also demonstrated how to make a textile dye bath of vegetable leftovers: onion skins, beet peels, red cabbage and avocado peels & stones. We took red cabbage to show how to manipulate the colour by changing the pH value. The purple red cabbage dye changed to red or pink when we added vinegar and to blue or green when we added baking soda. The participants could give their printed fabrics a dip-dye in the red cabbage dye bath and then experiment with changing the colour. |
| Colour manipulation with red cabbage |
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Do the colours fade over time? Does it go all brown or can you 'set' the colour?
ReplyDeleteIs it different for different farics?
Hi Mary, most colours will fade over time when exposed to light mainly. It's possible to set the colours, for washing for instance, with different mordant techniques depending on the type of fibre. Vinegar, alum, steam are some examples.
DeleteIf you research Hapa Zome you will find that even though the name is Japanese it was actually invented as a textile surface technique by an Australian textile artist India Flint, it really has nothing to do with Japan apart from she chose those two Japanese words to name the technique.
ReplyDeleteIn fact 5 yrs before India Flint published her book Eco Colour that had her flower pounding ideas in it, there was a book published in 2003 by an American Laura C. Martin. It is strange how everyone believes the Japanese invented this technique just because India Flint decided to use those two Japanese words to describe flower pounding, when in fact it was more likely to have been invented by Laura C. Martin and should not be called Hapa Zome or Tatakai Zome at all.
Hi Jacqui, Thanks for your comment, I appreciate it. Tataki-Zomé is indeed a Japanese technique. On the internet, you can trace the term back to 1997, as a workshop and teaching material for high school kids in Kawasaki Minami High School, Kanagawa Prefecture. Probably the technique itself is a lot older. Japan has been using transfer techniques on textiles and paper since ancient times. Whether it originates from Japan, I dare not say. A lot of it comes from China or India. Like ikat, which is called kasuri in Japan and which does have its own technique and cultural value. I know India's work and her beautiful book! We even exhibited together during the Earth Matters exhibition in the Netherlands. Indeed, she gave the term hapa zome to it herself. A bit verbose Japanese. She says about it herself: "The technique I call hapa zome (essentially a "kitchen Japanese" phrase meaning "leaf dye") was born of necessity when I was working on a theatre project in Yamaguchi, Japan in 2006". I didn't know Laura C. Martin's book yet, thanks for the tip! So you see, it's always important to give credit or refer to inspiration so that you don't unjustly appropriate anything to yourself.
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