Made in Japan, the craft works

Exhibition uses fabric, sound and film to explore traditional skills

TECHNOLOGICAL innovation is no new thing in Japan. It has been around for hundreds of years, from the innovative resuse of fabrics to the development of the ceramic heritage. This exhibition, first seen at CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile) in Hong Kong in 2019, then further developed at Japan House in London earlier this year, celebrates the design studio Nuno, run by Designer Sudo Reiko.

The set-up at Dovecot, Edinburgh’s tapestry studios, is a series of installations made by Tokyo-based designers Rhizomatiks, using fabric, sound and film to evoke the essence of making and innovation. In one corner, we have fabric made from the discarded outer layer of silk cocoons, Kibiso, its chequerboard-esque pattern laid out on a trestle, the raw materials laid out at the edge, the sound of an indeterminate machine – presumably to weave this material traditionally found too tough for the making of textiles – above.

Elsewhere, overhead projection shows a textile worker at Nakanishi Dye Works in the Kansai region, screen printing stitches in glue on to a fabric which is crinkled and heat shrunk, an innovative combination of polyvinyl alcohol, whose fibres are used in agricultural and industrial textile production, and thermoplastic polyester, layered and melded together. The techniques are fascinating, a marriage of technological innovation with centuries-old skills and a huge range of small textile factories and dye works whose heritage is strongly present in their work, yet who actively embrace new technologies.

Elsewhere, Japanese washi paper and amate bark cloth, the work of Otomi craftspeople in Mexico, are joined together in a cloth which makes homage to the contrasting qualities of both. It is fascinating and clinically innovative, at the same time.

This melding of traditions, of the old and the new, was the founding ethos of Nuno Fabrics, set up in 1984 in Kiryu in Gunma Prefecture, in the east of Japan. The current ethos is based on sustainability – of regional manufacturing, of materials and of craft skills. Sustainability, in another way, has long been part of Japanese textile tradition, as it has in many traditions worldwide. In northern Japan, from roughly the 1600s onwards, worn cotton fabrics, traded from other areas of Japan where the cotton plant thrived – unlike in the northern islands – would be revived by stitching them together in to new items with sashiko stitching (a running stitch, interlocking, often used to hold together a number of layers of fabric) and boro patching, each neatly done, creating hugely beautiful fabrics that were reused as clothing or futon covers.

Nuno recycles in a different way, perhaps in using materials which are the byproduct of modern manufacture, such as thermoplastics, alongside silk, hand-made washi (Japanese paper) and nylon tape. Craft traditions inform the new technologies used, including caustic burning, weaving and dying.

Whilst the fabrics themselves are fascinating and the installations inventive, the processes and ideas can seem obscured, dry – and the urge to touch these innovative fabrics to engage with them is overwhelming, thought strictly forbidden – and it is perhaps the films, made in textile factories in different parts of Japan, which are the most intriguing, invoking the human amongst the machine. Here is the cross-section of Japanese traditional skill and technological innovation. There are ancient-seeming looms here that have been mechanised, a snapshot of a

Above: Designer Sudo Reiko is renowned for championing new methods of sustainable manufacturing alongside Japanese craft traditions

recent past, but weavers and technicians are still required to cut threads, to man the machines, to monitor, to set up. In one instance, in a factory in Kyoto, a weaver laboriously, assiduously, cuts tiny threads across a roll of fabric in order to create a certain aesthetic effect of tiny frayed threads. The task looks Sisyphean, and it subtly raises too the question of what is and isn’t done by humans; of what should and shouldn’t be mechanised, of the human imprint on what might otherwise seem a process driven by machinery. There are a number of factories in Kyoto and elsewhere, each frequently in an old or industrial building, the machinery old yet immaculate, the floors clean. Some of it has a dystopian future look about it, the cement floors and spindly wheels whirring as thread is passed on to a loom.

The silk cocoons, too, as ever, are treated in a brutally industrial manner, run in rattling metal containers along a conveyor, plunged in boiling water, the silk thread skeining out, the cocoons pulled apart to make workable material.

Elsewhere, we see textile workers and weavers tending the huge looms and spindles, skilled workers engaging in different processes – it is fascinating stuff. These small factories exist in multiple locations across Japan, the films and the exhibition as a whole serving to underline the great living tradition of textile manufacture and innovation, and the long heritage behind the innovative fabrics produced.

Making Nuno: Japanese Textile Design Innovation from Sudo Reiko, Dovecot, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, 0131 550 3660, www.dovecotstudios.com , Until 8 Jan 2022, Mon-Sat, 10am-5pm, Adults £9.50, Concessions £8.50