The photorealistic image of bolts of cloth on the fabric shown here is not a printed design, but an intricate double weave. It was created with a jacquard loom and a computer, in 100% wool, by Junichi Arai, of Anthologies Ltd. of Japan. The folds and frayed ends in the pattern repeat play off the actual folds of the cloth and the intentionally exposed frayed seams of the 114-in. by 110-in. pieced wall hanging.
There are two planes of fabric in a double weave, and the warp and weft threads pass from one plane to the other, and back again. Because of these interchanging threads, the same image appears on the other side of the fabric, but in reverse where black threads create the pattern in one layer of the cloth, white threads create the same pattern in the other.
Arai's design began as a 4x4 photograph of bolts of fabric and was enlarged in scale by an elcetronic scanner. Arai used another computer to produce the 3,600 punch cards needed to weave the fabric.
“I don’t think I'm a textile designer. I think I am more like a textile planncr, a planncr and thinker of what thread does,” said Arai. “Last year I visited texti le weaver Peter Collingwood in England, and he said a textile designer is like a mathematician. I think this is my same idea.”
With the help of the computer, any design can be engineered for thc jacquard loom, but in addition to design possibilities, computers present production advantages. “If he has an idea for a design in the middle of the night,” Arai's translator, Chiaki Maki, explained, “the next day he can see a sample. Without the computer, hc would have to wait weeks, even longer."
Arai admitted that because the labor in- evolved is so intensive, without computers, his cloth would not have been made. To make fabric like the one shown here, a handweaver would have to work from an elaborate graph and use pick-up-sticks to manually raise the threads. “If people had to do just the punch cards for the jacquard,” Arm noted, “it would take one month by hand. This piece took me three days.”
“Today there is a revolution in the textile world, and the computer is helping. This is a two-layer fabric," said Arai. “Now I am planning to make an eight-layer fabric on the jacquard loom—it is only because of the computer that I can plan it."
Arai showed his remarkable fabrics at the “Textiles for the Eighties" exhibition and symposium last January at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence. The international exhibition of 120 innovative fabrics was organized to address the issues of craft, technology, and art. As textile artist Sheila Hicks comments in the exhibition catalog, the definition of textiles has expanded to include applications in “building dams, roads, racetracks, space and marine craft, tensile structures for large-span roofing, insulation walls, bridges, tents, and many other things besides furnishings." Thc exhibit included examples of these types of textiles and more. I likes contends that we will soon sec designers “influenced by a new kind of eclecticism" adapting indus- triaI fabrics to both interiors and fashion.
In conjunction with thc exhibition, curator Maria Tulokas, head of the textile design department at RISD, organized a one- day symposium to discuss the role of the artist-designer in the industry. Besides Arai and IIicks, panelists included textile designers Jack Lenor Larsen and Jay Yang, and Martina Margetts, editor of the British magazine Crafts. The discussion centered on the paucity of graduate programs in textile design and the need for design students to apprentice within the industiy.
Larsen, who is chairman of thc American Crafts Council and whose New York studio is considered a leader in design, pointed to “a vacuum for creative entrepreneurs," the need for designers to motivate and lead the marketeers. The ebuIIient Hicks then challenged the industry, and Larsen in particular, to make a commitment to take on students as interns.
Margetts pointed out that the same issues are at the forefront in Great Britain. She reported on a similar art-and-industry gathering, called “Texstyles," held in London last October, and showed slides of the best British work, declaring that “the people to watch are those doing construction (like Ami), not surface design."
Arai closed the discussion by producing a gift for Hicks: a tubular fabric that could be turned inside out to become three different scarves, one white, one black, and one black and white. After revealing the fabric's three identities, Arai merrily flipped one end of the tube onto his head and tossed the other around his neck to demonstrate that his computer-designed scarf made a perfectly sensible hat as well.
Arai then announced that both he and Maki were wearing computer-designed shirts that had no scams. Each garment had been woven as a tube in a jacquard double weave and taken whole off the loom. The computer had been programmed to weave the threads from the front and back double layers of the shirt so that all four layers were joined without seams at the shoulders.
The creation of a garment traditionally begins with the creation of the cloth. For Arai, fascinated with what fabric can become, the process can end there as well.D “Textiles for the Eighties" will be in West Palm Beach, FL, Sept. 14-Oct. 20, 1985; Montgomery, AL, May 4-June 29, 1986; Littleton, CO, July 13-Sept. 7, 1986; and Monlreal, Canada, Sept. 25-Nov. 20, 1986. A 64-page photographic catalog containing brief essays by Maria Tulokas, Jack Lenor Larsen, and Sheila Hicks is available for $16.50 from Ihe Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence., III 02901.
