Japan
Hello, I'm Yuki
Tanaka
Shibori is my discipline — seven years of study under a master dyer in Kyoto’s Nishijin district. Silk is not incidental to shibori. It is the reason shibori exists.
Yuki Tanaka is a Kyoto-based artist trained in the traditional Japanese dyeing technique of shibori — a resist-dyeing method that creates patterns through folding, twisting, and binding silk before submersion in natural indigo dye baths. She trained for seven years under master dyer Hiroshi Murata in the Nishijin district. Her designs carry the quietude of a Zen garden.
In Kyoto, we say that shibori is a conversation between the dyer and the fabric. You fold, you clamp, you submerge. The silk decides where the indigo enters and where it does not. You propose. The silk responds. Kelaghayi is the opposite. The galib is a declaration. The paraffin says: the dye will not enter here, this is the boundary, this is the form. The silk has no choice. The master has all the choice. I spent a long time thinking about whether these two philosophies could exist on the same piece of fabric. Then I stopped thinking and ordered a large sweet potato from the supermarket. I carved the Astuvansalmi elk — the Finnish rock painting shape that Aino showed me in a photograph — into the potato. I pressed it into a piece of Şeki silk sample with red iron-oxide pigment. Then I folded the same fabric in itajime shibori and dipped it in natural indigo. The elk appeared through the indigo in white and resist-blue. The declaration and the conversation at the same time. I called Aino immediately. She cried a little. So did I.
— Yuki Tanaka, Kyoto, Japan
Motif
Itajime shibori — fold and clamp resist
Kyoto, Japan · shibori · indigo dye
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.