William Morris, pillar of the arts-and-crafts movement in the 1880s opined, “There is only one real dye: indigo.”
Transformations: dialogues in art and material this May 9 – 17th at browngrotta arts will feature works from Japan, Korea, Venezuela, the UK, and the US that incorporate indigo. Every culture that discovered indigo seems to have felt the transformation as something more than chemical: the cloth goes into the vat one color and emerges another, steeped in a blue that belongs simultaneously to sky and sea and shadow. The plant’s leaves are dark green, and the mystical blue color is unveiled through a fermentation process — when a dyed article is exposed to air, the color transition occurs, starting from yellow to green, and ultimately resulting in the well-known indigo shade.
What connects the artists in Transformations who work in indigo — across continents and generations and very different formal concerns — is a relationship with the material that goes beyond color preference. Each has submitted to the discipline the dye demands. Indigo is not a paint you squeeze from a tube. It requires a living vat, careful chemistry, patience, and what practitioners often describe as ritual. It is a dye that demands discipline to use, with some indigo textiles taking thousands of hours to produce, requiring prolonged concentration akin to a meditative state.
Hiroyuki Shindo discovered the dye as a student: he first encountered indigo while at Kyoto City University of Fine Arts in Japan in the late 1960s, when an older artisan told him he was the last of 14 generations of indigo dyers. Shindo was determined to prevent the art form’s extinction. Over decades, Shindo maintained indigo vats in Kyoto and developed a distinctive technique entirely his own. He developed his own system, utilizing wide flat troughs in which he laid small stones, watching carefully as the indigo was drawn slowly into the fabric, creating gradations of hue — from nearly invisible shadows to areas of nearly black — through a combination of natural process and his own invention. The white of the cloth, Shindo insisted, was as important as the dyed portions.
James Bassler took a journey to indigo. In 1960, a voyage home from a civilian job in England via a cargo ship through Asia proved transformative. On this journey he witnessed the importance of world crafts and their essential role in cultures — a spinning and weaving demonstration in Bombay and the dyeing processes of Indonesia and Japan. Bassler has since explored the wedge-weave structure of the Navajo, shibori from Japan, and the scaffold weave of pre-Columbian cultures in his textile work. Indigo is threaded through decades of his practice. In works, such as Cumbe, he has used indigo-dyed silk and linen warps in combination with an array of other natural fibers — ramie, sisal, pineapple, nettles — creating textiles that feel like accumulated knowledge made visible.
Japan and paint were Polly Barton’s route to indigo. As a young artist, she worked as a personal assistant to abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, from whom Barton says she gained “permission” to build up layers of color in her own work. In 1981, she moved to Kameoka, Japan to study with master weaver Tomohiko Inoue, living in the religious heart of the Oomoto Foundation. Barton has spent over four decades exploring ikat, the ancient technique of binding skeins of yarn in calculated patterns before dyeing, which produces the distinctive blurred, feathered color transitions characteristic of the form. Indigo is central to her palette. Her work uses indigo alongside pigment, sumi ink, soy milk, and metal and silver leaf — materials that she layers to create luminous, meditative surfaces.
One of the foundational figures of American fiber art — and one of its great iconoclasts — Ed Rossbach taught for nearly three decades at the University of California, Berkeley, where he created works in almost every known textile technique during his five-decade-long career, experimenting with labor-intensive techniques such as Andean discontinuous warp weaving, Native American coiled basketry, European lace, and Indonesian ikat. Indigo appeared in his work as part of his deep engagement with global textile traditions. He used the dye not as an element in a restlessly curious practice that moved between the ethnographic and the anarchic — making a basket from plastic, a hanging from newspaper, a piece from tundra grass. Indigo was part of that global inventory, a dye he understood as one of humanity’s great shared materials.
Yeonsoon Chang takes indigo into the realm of philosophy. The Korean artist is known for creating ethereal works of starched indigo and was named Artist of the Year at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul in 2008. Chang’s signature material is abaca — a fiber derived from a species of banana plant — which she subjects to an elaborate 12-step process that includes starching, In her Matrix III series, she dyes the abaca fabric with indigo blue over thirty times, creating tightly stiffened material that pays homage to its disciplined creation. The Matrix series, she has said, illustrates the Asian perspective of the human mind and body as unified rather than separate — and the repeated dyeing, the compulsive labor, the rigid geometry are all in service of that idea.
The Venezuelan partnership of Eduardo Portillo and María Dávila may have traveled the furthest — literally and conceptually — to arrive at indigo. Working together since 1983, they have been dedicated to exploring the intricacies of the material production of textiles, traveling extensively in China and India to study the traditional techniques of indigo dye making, silk sericulture, and hand-weaving. Indigo became central to a pivotal body of work rooted in place and longing. Looking for blue in their mountain landscape and realizing they could only find it in the sky, they merged their previous projects — the silk, the vegetable fibers, the natural dyes — into a series called Azul Indigo, exhibited in 2012, recreating the hours of the day: sunrise, noon, sunset, night, and the night’s shadows — their interest in blue shifting with the intensity of light according to the hour.
That labor-intensive nature of indigo, paradoxically, is part of its appeal for contemporary artists working in an era of infinite digital speed. The vat slows you down. It insists on process. It connects you — through fermented indigo leaves and wooden mallets and resist-tied threads — to every dyer who has stood at a vat in Kano or Kyoto or the Carolina Lowcountry, watching cloth transform in the air. William Morris was right. There is only one real blue dye. And in the hands of artists like these, its presence is spell binding.
Join us to see their work at Transformations:dialogues in art and material (May 9-17).
