Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, Curator of Prints & Drawings
Drawn to artists who create site-specific and immersive installations, when I’m given the chance to bring these artists to Fort Wayne, their works often pose new technical challenges. For example, Sadashi Inuzuka’s Water Trade (2004) was a ceramic installation that involved pouring a pool of clay slip on the floor. Yes, a wet clay slurry in the gallery! Johnny Coleman’s Variation Upon a Theme: Song of the Underground Railroad (2013) brought in 1,000 pounds of river rock that was rinsed, dried, wheelbarrowed in, and raked.
The simplicity of form and pattern in Zurashi/Slipped in the current exhibition Rowland Ricketts: Invisible Forces belies the complexity of the process. Rowland Ricketts creates large-scale installations made up of fabric and yarn dyed with indigo that he has grown, processed, and vatted. The subject of one-person exhibitions at numerous museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, for each venue the work must be rethought, adjusted, and tailored to fit the space.
Zurashi/Slipped was originally commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum for the exhibition Ikat: A World of Compelling Cloth in 2023. In its reconfiguration at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Ricketts allowed it to subtly curve.
Ricketts says that he likes being a part of something larger than himself. As an indigo farmer and dyer, he is part of a long tradition and history. Making his own dye from seeds is time consuming, and he is at the mercy of nature dictating the schedule. His artistic practice is labor intensive, and the product is something that is immaterial (color) and temporary (an installation); perhaps a poetic metaphor for the transient nature of life and our endeavors.
This was the first project that Ricketts collaborated on with his wife Chinami, who is an accomplished kasuri ikat weaver. Ikat involves binding the yarn (Image 1, above), to protect or resist the dye. Chinami completes all the dyeing prior to weaving. In some ikat weaving only the warp or the weft are dyed in advance. In double ikat, Chinami plans the pattern and dyes both warp and weft before weaving.
Zurashi/Slipped is made up of 1.2 million yards of yarn in a beautiful array of off-white and light brown cotton fibers spun in Japan. The yarn was measured and warped, which took Chinami about three months. Each bundle of yarn was wrapped around a jig (Image 2, above) that had multiple posts that were offset (slipped) at a diagonal. Because the sections were staggered, the dyed areas form a stepped pattern. All the bundles were chained (Image 3, above) to avoid entwining. The sum was 1,008 bundles of yarn, each made up of 48 yarns and measuring 25 yards.
Zurashi/Slipped is a monumental piece that bisects and transforms the space in Gallery 2. It forms a curtain allowing only glimpses of the Unbound series of weavings on the walls. Ideally, the artist would make a site visit; however, in this case, Ricketts had to rely on gallery dimensions. He utilized a 3D modeling program to sketch up the specifications for the armature and the work’s placement. This was key to Brian Williamson and Rachel Baum, our technical staff, who needed to build the supporting wooden structure and determine how to suspend it from the ceiling in the gallery.
Over the course of four days, four people worked on two different lifts armed with color coded maps guiding the shade of indigo and placement. The up and down chevron pattern is offset from side to side. Bundles of chained yarn were unfurled, wrapping up and down between four slats of wood. Each color change required 36 bundles of yarn to complete a single row of the chevron pattern that was repeated 18 rows deep on one side.
Once the yarn was all hanging, wooden dowel rods were placed at the bottom of each row, weighting the yarn and providing the clean lines you see in the finished installation. It was important that the rows were spread apart from one another, top to bottom, to ensure that there were no tangles. Finally, Ricketts carefully examined each row at ground level and straightened any yarn that was twisted.
The yarn used in Zurashi/Slipped was warped so that it can be woven later. Adjacent to the installation is another collaboration between the Ricketts. In Zurashi/Woven, Chinami used some of the yarn from the installation to weave on a narrow-width Japanese loom. Rowland created subtle gradations of blue through dyeing and stitched the panels together. See these works of art and more by Rowland in his exhibition at FWMoA, on display through September 1, 2024.