Indigenous Textile Paintings & Video

"The cultures and economies of indigenous peoples, who are de facto the original conservationists, should be protected and supported."   — E. O. Wilson

“If we continue to engineer the extinction of the last remaining indigenous, traditional societies, we eliminate one of the last remaining sources of that wisdom.” — King Charles, from his book Harmony      

After decades of using drapery in my work as a fruitful repository for feelings and conversations with artists of the past, extensive travels led me to realize that the drapery – or textiles – from indigenous cultures could broaden the context to include my homage to their cultural value systems, which are most often sustainable and respectful of natural systems. Recent research acknowledges that collaboration between indigenous nations and conservationists holds a key to protecting biodiversity - and our planet!

MORE ABOUT Holly Downing’s INDIGENOUS DRAPERY PAINTINGS

We clothe ourselves the world over, with fabric, of some kind or another.  But those clothes are not merely functional - they are also cultural signifiers.  They tell us about hierarchy and to what particular culture and period in history they belong.  Is it the dress of the Flower Hmong or the Black Hmong in NW Vietnam?  Or the costume of which particular village on Lake Atitlán, Guatemala (as the dress of each village is different)? 

I have found that the textiles of traditional indigenous cultures is the most interesting to me, and that interest has taken me to those countries and many more besides - Morocco,  Ghana, Nepal, Peru.   

The textiles represent and reflect the mores, practices and beliefs of a culture.  The Quechua speaking people of the Peruvian Andes wear ponchos for warmth, to carry babies, produce and wood.  There are no baby carriers or plastic bags!  The traditional ponchos are hand-spun from sheep and llama wool, vegetable dyed, and hand spun on simple backstop looms.  To me they speak of a very ancient,  pre literate culture with its own sophistication, often overlooked or even disparaged by our Western culture.  They grow 3,000 kinds of potatoes, many in the snow, and traditionally passed on history and traditions through richly metaphoric folksong.

In the high altitude villages of the Himalayas in Nepal, Tibetan women signify their married status by wearing aprons or “bangdians” of wool from sheep and yak with beautifully colored vegetable dyed stripes, which remind me of more contemporary striped paintings. They warmed their houses with the dried manure of the local yak, which also provided meat and milk and which subsisted largely from the surrounding shrubbery. 

I admired much about these cultures and wanted to share something of their beauty and wisdom with my American culture. I was stuck with their resourceful practices that were in close harmony with their environments.

Sadly, some cultures no longer use their textiles for anything more than ceremony, yet even there they reflect a culture and a history.  And they have much to teach me.