This lush volume is a catalog of an exhibit mounted at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, curated by the textile scholar, Elena Phipps, with an introduction by Roy W. Hamilton. It features excellent commentary and photos of both ancient cloth and modern textiles woven in the same techniques. Additionally, it features historic black-and-white photos of indigenous weavers taken by John Cohen in the early 1950s.
Peruvian weavers—both ancient and modern—have the power to astonish us even today. Weavers from the third millennium BCE until the present day, developed a huge variety of spinning and weaving techniques, producing “some of the most magnificent and complex handwoven textiles ever made. The techniques and the iconography are…exclusive to Peru” (Hamilton, 7). Their beauty and complexity astound us. Produced without any advanced technology, and developed prior to ceramics, their presence upends our notions of how civilizations are supposed to develop. Peruvian weavers, ancient native people, without advanced technology, created outrageously complex works of art that we cannot easily understand or recreate.
Given an almost 10,000-year history of weaving in Europe and Eurasia, histories of weaving in the Western narrative generally highlight the complex tapestries of the early Renaissance and the industrialization of weaving—Jacquard looms and water or steam powered mills. Meanwhile, native Andean people—mostly women, apparently—were producing complicated textiles in a wide variety of techniques—figural weaving, tapestry, needle-weaving, knotting, looping, braiding, twining, embroidery, painting. The four-selvaged cloth is one such technique.
The selvage is a finished edge, the sides of a piece of woven cloth. Western-style looms typically produce long lengths of cloth, with the two sides along the edges finished in a selvage edge, and two unfinished ends—called raw edges--at the beginning and ends of a very long piece of cloth, called a bolt of fabric. Western-style clothes are cut from as many yards or meters of cloth as necessary, and garments are generally fitted—with sleeves, legs, waists, etc. Indigenous Peruvian fabric had a different set of expectations. There, one or two mirrored pieces of cloth were woven to pre-determined dimensions, and sometimes stitched together without any cutting to become a man’s kilt, a poncho, a woman’s dress, a mantle, a garment for a child. Garments were keys to elaborate sets of social and political relations. Additionally, weavers produced specialized cloth for religious ceremonial use, especially for burials. Everyone wove for the king. Because the climate of mountainous Peru is so dry, the buried dead were preserved as natural mummies, and the multiple layers of intricately woven textiles that covered the dead—up to five or six layers or more—were also preserved.
A four-selvaged cloth is woven to the specific size needed for the intended use of the garment. All the sides are finished, and the cloth comes off the loom as a finished, or nearly finished, garment. The loom for this style of cloth is simple—four poles, a simple frame. The warp threads are wrapped around two opposite poles. The side poles keep the threads tensioned, though some are waist-tensioned. Weavers pack the weft densely, so that when the poles holding the entrapped ends of the warp are finally removed, the weaver can slide the extra threads into the ends, creating a finished edge. The warped loom can be laid flat, can be propped up beside a house, or can be stood upright. It doesn’t matter. The weaver sits in front of it. Threads were spun from native cotton, maguey, and especially from camelid fibers—llama, vicuna, and alpaca—and dyed in brilliant colors from both plant and insect dyes, or painted, or even resist-dyed.
Weavers accomplished “incredibly complex technical feats” (14), creating not only garments, but also tools, nets, and weapons, and weaving figured in the development of mathematical models, architecture, and bridges (14), and aided in the spread of religious ideas. Young women who were particularly gifted weavers, were recruited into imperial weaving workshops, where they wove extremely complex garments for the ruling class.
The motifs that Peruvian weavers used are astonishing. Stepped or geometric forms often dominate the cloth, and figures nestle in complicated patterns. Scaffolding yarns or sticks allowed for patterns in discontinuous wefts, creating miniature selvaged units within the whole cloth. Extremely complex weaves of triple or quadruple layers of colors—each its own warp and weft—were used for women’s belts. A great variety of bird images are common, as are human or deity figures, presented frontally and elaborately costumed. Human-faced felines may be deities, and even stylized plants like cotton, corn, or beans make appearances. Finished cloth ranges from heavy winter garments to airy gauzes. They might be further embellished with fringes, tabs, woven bands, and embroidery. There are even three-dimensional edgings of birds and flowers apparently woven with small needles, something like a combination of looping (like crocheting), weaving, and knitting.
Modern art-weavers have experimented with Andean techniques, and the works of three of them are also part of this exhibit and catalogue. It is fascinating to see how ancient techniques produce refined artistic works in fiber. John Cohen’s photos, taken mostly in the 1950s, provide yet another level of information on the techniques and artistry of both ancient and modern traditional Peruvian artists.
For further information, the bible of Peruvian textile study is Raol d’Harcourt’s Textiles of Ancient Peru and Their Techniques (University of Washington Press, 1987). I also really like the 1992 volume edited by Rebecca Stone-Miller, To Weave for the Sun: Andean Textiles in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The latter is a collection of excellent essays on Peruvian weaving.
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[Review length: 915 words • Review posted on December 1, 2015]