The poetics and practice of Chiaki Maki

That's how Ganga Maki came about. The 2.5-acre campus in Dehradun was designed by Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, and Chiaki fully settled into it in 2017. Growing fibres and natural dye materials; the making of yarn; dyeing and weaving, from beginning to end, it all happens here. In a sense, Chiaki did not merely start making things by hand, she began by building the conditions under which her practice could grow in complete surrender to nature.

A Quiet Hand

In contemporary discourse, we tend to either elevate textiles into art by abstracting them from use, or to preserve them as craft by binding them to tradition. Chiaki is unattached to such hierarchies of practice, and looks only towards a fibre’s character and the hand’s encounter with it. “And I want to have fun! In the past, I have made textiles for the body and for the home. But sometimes I want to create just for the joy of creation without worrying if a fibre will stretch, will it wrinkle, will it be strong enough? To create without that constraint is more freeing. Then you may call it art, if you like.” Simply said, that is Chiaki's artist statement, as she prepares for what is her third exhibition in India—A Quiet Hand. Curated by Manju Sara Rajan (who is also the editor of Beautiful Homes), it will open later this month at Kaash in Bengaluru, an exhibition space, a studio and an artist residency set up by Sridhar Poddar in 2020.

Hand-reeled silk from cocoons is paired with choma or ramie fibre and dyed with fresh harsingar or night jasmine flowers; endless shades of indigo colour the raw bheemal fibre, woven together with Himalayan wool; tussar silk and mulberry silk, dyed red with madder and sappanwood; colours drawn from pomegranate and marigold—it is a selection of works, atmospheric and earthy at the same time, and all made from materials grown and nurtured at Ganga Maki. Nature is her only point of reference and alignment with it her only concern, as she prepares these works for this rare showing at Kaash, an equally rare setup for its disinterest in the pace of the market, unhurried search for meaning, drawn simply by an affection for craft.
 

A Labour of Love

Chiaki admittedly has a special affection for indigo. She checks the vats in the mornings, touches the water, tastes it lightly. “Some days the colour looks tired and I know I’ve overworked it.” If the weather shifts unexpectedly, the crop changes. It is easy to romanticise the notion of such a life, but taken seriously and realistically, it reveals the emotion her practice demands. To grow dye, rather than buy, is to submit to a kind of dependence on the unknown. The material can fail. The season can disappoint. The effort may not return. But in Chiaki’s words, in her gesture and her work, one discovers that precisely in the surrender lies her ethical stance: beauty is not manufactured against such conditions but crafted along them. “Living with plants teaches me. I feel the breath of the land remains within the materials. Even when indigo is grown with the same care, its colour shifts slightly every year. As I harvest, I sometimes sense the form that wants to emerge. Feeling these each day, I continue to make,” she writes in the exhibition note of a previous show titled Voice of Nature, which was held earlier this year in Tokyo.

Silk offers an even more evocative and precise vocabulary for this idea. Chiaki describes how a silkworm spins its cocoon and how its motion is embodied in the fibre. “At first, their bodies are very small. They eat the mulberry leaves for days and slowly grow. When they are ready, they start to make the cocoon, and their head moves in a small, quivering action. And as the silk fibre emerges, you see that it’s not straight, it has a wave,” Chiaki explains. The trace of movement held inside the fibre itself: this is an extraordinarily rich proposition, not only aesthetically but philosophically. The Japanese word Yuragi articulates this fluctuation that exists in all nature, where nothing is perfectly straight, but has an inherent, subtle wave. Chiaki’s way of being is committed to preserving that quiver rather than ironing it out. In some of the textiles showing at KAASH later this month, this wave appears most evocatively. The fibres are gathered by hand, lightly twisted and air-dried. Their thick warp threads combined with a nearly invisible weft, create an impression of shadow and depth. Some are dyed in indigo, others in madder red, some in banyan bark and others in harsingar, or the night jasmine. Colour, for Chiaki, is an emotion and an energy. She speaks fondly of her harvest of the harsingar. “At the end of August or the beginning of September, the harsingar blooms—only at night. If you come out of my room at about midnight, there is a carpet of jasmine that has fallen to the ground. In complete darkness, the flowers would have opened their petals, the fragrance follows and that’s how I know. We gather these flowers, sometimes use them as is, but mostly they are dried and used throughout the year. It’s the most beautiful lemon yellow colour that we receive from flowers,” she says.