Finland
Hello, I'm Aino
Mäkinen
I trace the 5,000-year-old red ochre paintings on Finland’s lakeside cliffs — elk, boats, human figures mid-dance — and press them into Şeki silk using the same iron-oxide pigment. The oldest human marks, on the oldest silk tradition.
Aino Mäkinen grew up on the shores of Lake Saimaa in southern Finland, where the granite cliffs along the waterways still hold 5,000-year-old paintings in red ochre — human figures, elk, boats, and geometric marks left by Stone Age hunters who believed the rock was alive. She spent her childhood tracing these shapes with her fingers. She spent her adulthood learning to press them into silk.
The Astuvansalmi cliff is eleven metres above the lake surface now. When the Stone Age painters stood on their boats and pressed red ochre into the granite, the water was at eye level. They painted from the water, looking straight into the rock face. The paintings were not meant to be looked at from below. They were made at the level of the eye, in the moment. I have been thinking about that for thirty years. When Thor Heyerdahl stood at Gobustan and saw the same boat shapes that appear at Astuvansalmi, he asked: are these the same people? I think the question is more interesting than the answer. What it means is that 8,000 years ago, humans in what is now Azerbaijan and humans in what is now Finland were pressing the same marks into stone. The same impulse. The same hand. I ordered iron-oxide pigment — the same mineral the Astuvansalmi painters used — from a natural dye supplier in Helsinki. I ground it myself. I carved linden wood blocks with the elk shape, the boat shape, the figure mid-dance. When I pressed the first test onto Şeki silk, the colour was exactly the colour of the cliff paintings. The rock art left Saimaa. It found its way home to the Caucasus. I did not plan this. The material planned it.
— Aino Mäkinen, Saimaa Lakeland, Finland
Motif
Astuvansalmi elk
Finland · c. 3000 BC · red ochre on granite
How a collaboration works
Each artist here drew a pattern, and a master in Şəki turned it into cloth. Those are two separate skills and neither one substitutes for the other: the drawing decides what the piece says, and the block-cutting and dyeing decide whether silk can be made to say it.
The artists were not asked to imitate Azerbaijani ornament. They were asked for their own — shibori from Japan, adire from Nigeria, the block-printed vocabulary of Rajasthan, the wool figures of a Kyrgyz shyrdak — and then that drawing had to survive being cut into pear wood and held under hot wax. What comes back is neither the artist’s tradition nor Şəki’s. It is the argument between them.
The signature
Every artist page carries a signature, and every piece is published under the name of the person who drew it rather than under a house style. That is deliberate. A kelaghayi is anonymous work by tradition — the stamps in Basqal have outlived the names of everyone who cut them — and putting a name back on the cloth is the one thing Navohi does that the tradition does not.
Some artists have a full collection here. Some have a single concept piece that was never made. Both are on the page, because the record of what was proposed is part of the record of what exists.
Reading the pattern
The ornament is not decoration that happened to settle on the cloth. Each motif carries information, and the literature of the craft calls the whole system a book of life for anyone who can read its signs. Borders and centre take different stamps: pomegranate flower, crescent, grapevine and sun around the edge; small flowers, coins, quince flower, gazelle eyes, cat’s paw and leaf across the field. Plant motifs run to rose, narcissus, carnation, poppy, lily and iris, and they are set against straight and broken lines, zigzags, rhombuses and stars.
Colour is read the same way. Blue, red and ochre gold are the healing colours, credited with turning away the evil eye. Age and standing govern what is worn: dark, quiet tones and sparse ornament for an older woman; bright colour for a young one, who by tradition would not put on a black kelaghayi even at a funeral. The seven-colour work — red, blue, yellow, green, white, pink and dark brown on a single cloth — is held to be the ceiling of the craft.