This week African print fabrics have been the topic du jour in the studio.
Mary, our curator and conservator, has been hard at work cataloguing and sorting out the fabrics, many of which have been bought in London or South Africa. It can get quite complicated because where do wax prints end and printed textiles begin, so there is lots of discussion about pieces and where they belong in the collection.
African prints, or those we know as African prints, are enmeshed with colonial history. Java prints came from Indonesia via the Dutch and so some of the prints in the collection reflect that connection. Some have a European connection, designed in the UK or in the Netherlands, and so have a different feel and look to those that are created in China. This is where the collection of fabrics and the library have come together – a book in the library has been very useful in researching these cloths and finding out their origins.
This week a friend came into the studio with a piece that had been bought in the 1960s in Tanzania. The look (this website shows a piece that has the same kind of design) is very similar to some of the newer pieces in the collection, bought in Zimbabwe, but the quality is very different. The Tanzanian cotton cloth is beautifully soft and the colours are still bright with detail that reveals the wax technique origins of the print. It is amazing to feel and see the difference that this cloth from the middle of the last century has compared to the fabrics produced in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s. The Tanzanian fabric is thick and luxurious while the Zimbabwean one is thinner and less opulent. It would be very interesting to trace the stories of the fabrics from the two locations to find out why that difference exists.
Read more:
African wax prints on Wikipedia
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