To the wonderful artists I work with!

taken from: http://blog.weargianna.com/2010/07/to-wonderful-artists-i-work-with.html

Recently I was able to meet a very intelligent, independent and artistic gallery owner in Vientiane. Her full time job is an architect but she has recently opened an antique textile shop. Every time I walk into her gallery, I am mesmerized by all the textile pieces, old and new, and just by the calm and peaceful atmosphere of her gallery. For her, textiles are not just normal pieces of cloths used for whatever purpose they have been produced for. Every motif, pattern, and designs on each piece have their own meanings, and together all of these textiles are telling us stories, stories that have been perhaps passed on and on by generations and generations of weavers, stories that together as a whole defines the Lao-Tai people and their culture. I cannot explain how my view of textiles has changed since I heard the gallery owner explain to me each of her collection. It’s as if I’ve been near-sighted all along and have for the first time in my life put on a pair of glasses.

I was surprised to find how many of the pieces in her collection are so creative with combinations of geometric figures, animals, symbols, mystic figures…and so on. Though every piece of textile was woven for its own use, either as a wall hanging, as a bed cloth, or a table runner but they definitely had a deeper meaning than what they were made for. When looking at these pieces, I really wonder, what were the weavers thinking? Was this a way for women to express themselves? Did they have stories that they wanted the future generation to know? Or were they just weaving them as patterns they thought were pretty? Or is this a master conspiracy that was planned by the Lao-Tai ancestors thousands of years ago to pass on some kind of code so that their offspring can decipher one day?

And how do the women perceive weaving nowadays? Is weaving simply a source of income or do they still hold significant cultural values?

One of the favorite pieces of the gallery owner is this huge textile that was woven by a 80 year old women that portrays her depiction of her village. The owner told me “for me, this women is no longer just a weaver, she is expressing an idea through her weaving and she is an artist.”

Although providing a market for lao textile is a great way to maintain the supply of textiles and through which the practice and culture of weaving can be continued. However, it would be very unfortunate if the balance is tipped over and textiles will one day be viewed simply as commodities by both the buyers and the producers and lose the rich meaning they used to embody.

My hope is that every weaver will remain as an artist. An artist in a sense that their pieces still embodies meanings, though they may have different meanings than the pieces produced by their ancestors; it could embody their strong determination to fight against urbanization, it could embody their desire to create better opportunities for them and for their children, it could also be telling the industrialized world to take another look at what kind of perfection and beauty humans, with their own hands and with what’s given to them by their environment, are capable of creating.