Fields of Indigo: Installation by Rowland Ricketts with Sound by Norbert Herber
A collaboration between textile-artist Rowland Ricketts and sound artist Norbert Herber, this installation leads visitors through the process of making indigo, a dye historically derived from a variety of plants including Polygonum tinctorum, also known as “dyer’s knotweed.” Indigo, which for centuries created desires for bright blue cloth around the globe, has long been identified with Japan, where Ricketts trained in the dyers’ shops of Tokushima. In his work, Ricketts focuses on the corporeal acts involved in the dye’s production; color is imbued with the memory of movement. Thus, through sound and video collage, the movements of visitors in the gallery will illuminate how indigo is grown, composted, decomposed, and concocted into a pungent dye. As visitors tread on the indigo, separating leaf from stem, they take part in the winnowing that initiates the plant’s decomposition.
Sounds emanating from the gallery were collected at various sites, threading connections among them: Ricketts’ farm and studio, Indiana University’s Hilltop Garden and Nature Center, the Student Sustainable Farm in Champaign where the indigo in the Krannert installation was grown and harvested, and the fields and dyers’ shops in Tokushima, where Ricketts has developed the I am Ai project as part of the 2012 National Cultural Festival. This event celebrates the local indigo tradition, while reinventing a craft largely abandoned. Fields of Indigo embodies transformation: a sensuous domain, displaced from a tilled field and juxtaposed with the deep surfaces of dyed cloth, which embody both a history of work and the generative force of seed.
Sounds emanating from the gallery were collected at various sites, threading connections among them: Ricketts’ farm and studio, Indiana University’s Hilltop Garden and Nature Center, the Student Sustainable Farm in Champaign where the indigo in the Krannert installation was grown and harvested, and the fields and dyers’ shops in Tokushima, where Ricketts has developed the I am Ai project as part of the 2012 National Cultural Festival. This event celebrates the local indigo tradition, while reinventing a craft largely abandoned. Fields of Indigo embodies transformation: a sensuous domain, displaced from a tilled field and juxtaposed with the deep surfaces of dyed cloth, which embody both a history of work and the generative force of seed.