Beyond the weave: Textile as art
Marie Gnanaraj is soft spoken, but with firm views about textiles. Her new exhibition n Texture Matters is a rallying cry that we regard textiles as art. “I am challenging the idea that a loom just makes fabric. I am manipulating the loom to divide space, to knot and to twist. …and find new textures,” says Marie.
To make her point, she walks up to a hanging of brilliant oranges and reds that resembles a tapestry but also a screen of a kind. She then deftly rolls up a centrepiece and observes that this was inspired decades ago when her home was a construction site.
Structured weave: Intricate detail in every knot and twist. Pix by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
“We call it the loomed doorway… because for the longest time we didn’t have a doorway,” explains her daughter, Marisa, the clothing designer behind M Fact, who helped put the exhibition together. A Modernist Mughal would have been happy to have the doorway as an entry to a royal tent. Modern-day potentates visiting the Cinnamon Bentota Beach, an architectural statement that doubles as a giant art gallery, would encounter her works there.
Even after a career in Barefoot that spanned almost five decades, and more than 30 years as design director till her retirement in 2022, Marie, 75, is still experimenting with the loom. “This is an exploration of the number of textures she can create from one simple loom. There is a heaviness, a softness, a transparency,” says Marisa. “The front looks different and as you walk around it (the work) becomes different. It’s a meditative process on what textiles can achieve.”
Texture Matters, which opened at the Barefoot Gallery on August 14, is spectacularly well timed. Globally, textile art is enjoying its moment in the spotlight as museums and galleries seize on works, usually by African artists and women, to add to their collections.
More than 100 years after the Bauhaus movement initially sought to put weaving and women artists on an equal footing, the nonagenarian American artist Sheila Hicks, who was influenced by weaving techniques from Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world, and the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos are being celebrated with exhibitions from the US to Hong Kong. Vasconcelos’ huge installations were a centrepiece at the Art Basel HK show last year. “She (Gnanaraj) is very much on trend,” says Jan Dalley, long-time arts editor of the Financial Times London and a contributing editor to the paper, of the proliferation of exhibitions of works of textiles around the world. “Who would have thought we would see quilting in art galleries?”
In fact, Marie and Barefoot’s founder Barbara Sansoni were Modernist trend-setters decades ago. Bauhaus paid lip service to female emancipation, but then discriminated against female students and artists by confining them to certain disciplines and concocting weird theories that women were only able to think in 2D, unlike men who perceived the world in 3D. By contrast, Barefoot’s senior management team were almost all women, including Anne Koch, who ably managed the company in its early decades. “I don’t think they even thought about it,” says Dominic Sansoni, who leads it today. Few enterprises put the handloom at the centre with a colour palette so vividly vibrant that it seemed an art movement all its own, uncompromising Fauvism in fabric.
Marie Gnanaraj. Pic by Dominic Sansoni
But, for all its painterly instincts, from its inception the store’s worldview has been profoundly pragmatic. Barefoot’s founding in 1964 was to create work for under-privileged women in rural Sri Lanka. This inevitably meant that products from its looms were predominantly functional, ranging from tablecloths to sarongs to cushion covers.
In addition to being a designer of exceptional breadth in her own right, Marie also translated Barbara’s landscape paintings of a dramatic southern Sri Lankan sunset or the burst of colour in the Jaffna shrub into the warp and weft grid that a handloom requires.
In Marie’s home studio, however, this pragmatism gave way to whimsy and experiments in weaving. Since1989 and in the years after, inspired by the construction project as the house she lives in took shape around her, she started to incorporate even wire into the weaves that she made. “Knowingly or unknowingly the construction around her became her inspiration –bricks, exposed walls, wood, wire,” says Marisa. This is apparent in the colours, which skew towards variations of red, orange and rust but also blacks and cement-like greys.
Fascinated also by the things her children were playing with, especially a kind of hut her son created as an after-school refuge made of bamboo, rope and wood left over from the construction site, she began to explore more complex textures as she weaved. “My children were messing around with materials with whatever they found around the house. All that became inspirational,” Marie recalls. “It had a rope ladder into it, windows of plastic that rolled up and down, a bulb, and a first aid box with a bottle of Dettol. He was a Scout.”
In many of the works that are part of Marie’s show, each rectangle has a different feel to it, the whole incorporating a diversity in weaves. One has loops made as part of the weaving that could function as pen holders where small pieces of wood slot in. (This hanging has similarities to a work of Sheila Hicks at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That work of Hicks’ has a Mexican influence, a reminder that Asia and Latin America and Africa led textile art.)
Marie’s face lights up when discussing her favourite colour –red—but the fence work is fittingly in in sober colours of grey, ivory and bronze. Her Check Your Stripe line of Barefoot sarongs have always seemed as much abstract art as clothing; one in blocks of burnt orange, black and slate is currently draped across the chaise longue in my living room.
Dramatic display: Marie’s works exhibited at Barefoot
Explaining her way of working, Marie says, “I don’t sketch much. I work directly on my loom. I have a plan in my head… I make a note of the proportions and structure.”
In the exhibition’s introduction, she writes, “I see these works now through new conversations and interpretations. Some have been altered or expanded upon, while others remain deliberately unfinished; they give insight into an ongoing internal dialogue with texture.” The result is a celebratory exhibition of the art and craft of a pioneer, who, at 75, is still innovating.
| The exhibition | |
| Marie Gnanaraj’s ‘Texture Matters’ brings together finished works, previous exhibition pieces, fragments, samples and unfinished experiments, as well as reworked weaves that shed a light into the labour and dynamism of weaving as artistic process. It is at the Barefoot Gallery till August 24. |
Searching for an ideal partner? Find your soul mate on Hitad.lk, Sri Lanka's favourite marriage proposals page. With Hitad.lk matrimonial advertisements you have access to thousands of ads from potential suitors who are looking for someone just like you.