Full Description
During the cherry blossom season of April 1924, 100 years ago, on his only trip to the Land of the Rising Sun, Alfred Baur, an extraordinary entrepreneur and founder of the Museum of Far Eastern Art in Geneva, was charmed to discover the sparkling poetry of the "images of the floating world" (ukiyo-e), combined with the landscapes of the great masters of the print and the delightful motifs found throughout the objects in his superb collection of Japanese art.
Echoing his taste and pioneering spirit, and as part of the celebrations marking the 160th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Switzerland and Japan, this book, thanks to contributions from leading specialists in the fields of handicrafts and textiles, takes an in-depth historical, technical and comparative look at the desire for lightness that underpins the aims, aesthetics and meaning of the work of Michiko Uehara, a virtuoso weaver.
In her studio bathed in the subtropical sunshine of Okinawa, in the archipelago in the far south of Japan where she was born and which is renowned for its textiles, she succeeds in pushing the material to the very edge of nothingness, weaving and dyeing sublime fabrics in three-denier threads*, as fine and transparent as "a dragonfly's wing" (akezuba in the local language).
This bonding relationship - combining the physical and the spiritual - which links Uehara to silk fibres and more generally to nature itself, gives rise to "woven air", as she puts it: an aerial, rhythmic journey, free of borders and attuned to living things.
As this book suggests, this quest is not unrelated to some of the research carried out by Swiss explorer Bertrand Piccard, whose solar aircraft, a giant, silent dragonfly whose carbon-fibre ribs combine extreme strength and lightness, intelligently weaves a harmonious path between humanity, earth and sky...
* The Denier (Den) is a measure of continuous thread, i.e. its weight in grams per 9000 metres of thread; i.e. 1 Den = 1 gr./9000m of thread
Text in English and French.
Contents
6 Plus léger que l'air : le vol de la libellule
7 Lighter than Air: The Flight of the Dragonfly
Laure Schwartz-Arenales
26 Uehara Michiko: l'indicible
27 Uehara Michiko: The Unutterable
Shukuko Voss-Tabe
28 Voyages au gré du fil
29 Journeys Following the Thread
Uehara Michiko
36 À tâtons, tisser jusqu'aux frontières du visible...
Les défis de Uehara Michiko
37 Groping, Weaving to the Frontiers of the Visible. . .
The Challenges of Uehara Michiko
Miyagawa Tomomi
52 Fils et é toffes, l'extension de la vie
53 Threads and Fabrics, Extensions of Life
Moroyama Masanori
56 De Bologne à Okinawa : légèreté et transparence de la soie à la limite de la perception
57 From Bologna to Okinawa: The Lightness and Transparency of Silk at the Edge of Perception
Suzanne Lassalle
66 Un avion telle une libellule dans le ciel
67 A Plane Like a Dragonfly in the Sky
Bertrand Piccard
126 Épilogue et remerciements
127 Afterword and Acknowledgements
