Batik on silk for me is a love affair with light and color. That is what I wish to share, so I present my work as spatial screens of light, rather than images pinned to a wall. I started doing batiks more than 30 years ago. I had a friend who was working in this medium, and she showed me the basic principles of the technique. I was drawn to the process right away. I was an architect already at the time, and it resonated with what I was enjoying about architectural design. I enjoy the unexpected beauty and order that emerges from a rigorous process. Batik occurs in a layered sequence governed by certain laws of how fabric fibers absorb dye color. There is a play of idea and gesture within a given set of rules about the elements; colors emerge with a structural quality; light is channeled and revealed.
Silk is a noble material. It has been a shaper of human history and aesthetics. The silk filaments are volatile with light and color, and they are steady in holding a pattern – a memory. Pattern is a process of repetition, an incarnated and memorized trace of life force. The wax is also a material with vital patterning. As I paint with the melted wax on the silk, I feel the thrill of participation, of bringing to light a gesture, a color, a line. Knowing that the silk will ineffaceably preserve every gesture could be paralyzing. Sometimes when I have the blank canvas of white silk before me, I feel the heartbreak of doing anything. But then there is the factor of time and layers. If I move through a thought or an idea and another is offered up in its wake it creates a larger pattern, where a single line - be it perceived as a mistake or as a perfect note - is absorbed into a larger energetic entity. I work steadily, with a fascination and a sort of faith in the process.
Woodwork and carpentry were my path away from an architecture that was institutionally isolated from the act of building. I wanted a more intimate encounter with materials, so I apprenticed as a carpenter, and then launched a design-build practice where I general contracted the heavy labor and did the fine craft with my partner and other collaborators. In those years, I gravitated to traditional Japanese woodworking, which taught me about another noble material: wood. I spent years creating translucent, sliding screens, called shoji. I made some of them in hand-crafted purity, following the teachings of a Japanese master, Toshio Odate, who wrote detailed books about the techniques. I also designed and built modern interpretations of shoji, always with a respect and a rigor in the craftsman way.
For me, craft (the way of the artisan) is the humble rigor of practice: every day facing the “Just This”. The moods and thoughts, like the gunas of Hindu cosmology, come and go. The work can continue steadily, serving a larger law that liberates from the burden of individuality. Each day this steady practice with the laws of nature sets the cadence for the melody of the ephemeral, individual pleasures – or displeasures.
Jean d’Ormesson speaks of his craft as a writer as a desire to stop, or to arrest, time. I feel the same desire in my artwork: to capture a moment, to immortalize it. In fact, that also perhaps kills it, but such is the paradoxical pursuit of beauty. I often wish to stop the batik in its progression, to leave it in the innocence and perfection and vivacity of the indeterminate and incomplete. I enjoy the surprises, the barely grasped, and the unknown more than the completed version. But I usually keep going until I feel completion somehow. Even in the completed version I see the journey of each stage of the process – I don’t know if that reads in the piece for others. My observation is that the silk fibers have memory such that nothing is lost. For this show I have prepared a book of photographic batik process stories. I also will be presenting concept sketches alongside the batiks.
