Boro textiles
Mended and patched textiles
In Japan, mended and patched textiles are referred to as 'boro', or rags. For some time within Japan boro was regarded with shame because these utilitarian textiles are strong evidence of rural Japan's impoverished past. Nonetheless, boro has begun to attract considerable interest outside Japan.
Boro's visual relationship to European and American modernist painting is striking; perhaps this is the basis of the attraction by Westerners to this material. More than that, boro's collage-like construction of Edo and Meiji era rags and patches offers us a veritable encyclopedia of cotton indigo from those periods.
The sheer variety of tones of blue, the juxtaposition of pattern, the scale changes between patterns and patches, the free-form and meandering stitching, the random assortment of color combinations is so 'Dada-like' in concept--and so beautiful in result--that these pieces beg to be admired as artworks, albeit artworks never intended to be noticed as such. Imagine that these pieces were stitched in the shadows of farmhouses, usually at night by the light of one dim andon, on the laps of farm women: this extraordinary hardship and this unselfconscious creative process have yielded soulful beauty that deserves to be recognized.
Unavailable products
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