Diligence and Elegance

de Natalia Nekrassova, Susan Warner Keene

"The catalogue presents over 50 textiles and garments from the Textile Museum of Canada's collection of 19th and 20th century artifacts made in Japan for both everyday and occasional use. It includes luxurious silk and gold fabrics produced in Kyoto's professional weaving workshops, domestic indigo-dyed cotton, plant-fibre cloth, and silk kimonos crafted in an astonishing spectrum of time-honoured techniques--weaving, dyeing, hand painting, gold foil application and embroidery. The exhibition focuses on the highly refined skills and materials by which textiles have been constructed and decorated over centuries, and on how diligence and ingenuity have shaped their timeless beauty. It also features the contemporary work of Hiroko Karuno and Keiko Shintani, two Japanese-Canadian artists whose consummate craftsmanship and philosophies are profoundly connected to the evolution of Japanese textile traditions of spinning, dying and weaving."--