African Textiles!

So the past week we have been talking a lot about African Textiles in class. I have found it to be very interesting thus far. I have really enjoyed having Nani come to visit and show us batik and to see African drumming and dance from the Ghana area. It's been a pleasure getting to see how he expresses his art and dance in different ways then we do here in  the U.S.A.

When I found out that we were going to be doing Batik, a African Textile form this week, I was really excited. I love making things or doing things that other cultures do because I love learning about their traditions. Plus, I'm better at seeing how something is done then reading about it in a book. Something about being able to do batik makes it easier for me to understand how the process works then to read about it. It's so much more raw and real when you can actually see it in real life.

Batik as I said earlier is what we were doing with Nani during our workshops this week. It's a process in which you take wooden stamps and you dip them into hot wax called wax resist. Then you stamp your cloth with one or many stamps and die the cloth after that. Each one of the stamps has a meaning, such as the one I used for my cloth , it meant strength is unity. (Picture Below) 

Strength is Unity Stamp

My Batik Cloth

This is something I found to be awesome about adinkra stamping when we were learning about it this week. I like that the symbols are so abstract that if you were to look at them you wouldn't know the meaning of the stamp unless you were to know them by heart or if you had a chart that told you the symbol's meaning. I'm very fascinated in this type of textile form. I tend to wonder though how these symbols came to be and who decided what the meaning of each of these stamps are? Since this technique did not originate in Africa, it also makes me wonder who's idea it was and if the stamps were changed over time? It would make since that the technique and symbols would change over time because nothing never stays the same and each culture always puts their own ideas on what they want the item or items to look like and how they would fit within their culture.

In the John Picton article he explained the purpose of adinkra stamping. They commonly print them on funeral clothing. The colors depend on where to wear these adinkra stamped cloths though. The colors black, brown, red, and purple printed cloths are to be worn from the time of death to the time of burial and a white printed cloth is to be worn for post burial celebrations. Just like Nani said about his dancing skirt colors each color has a meaning for something, just like these colored cloths have a meaning for when to wear them. Plus each adinkra stamp has a proverb attached to it and work with the other stamps to make a more meaningful story to the clothing, like Picton says in his article. So, not only does the color have meaning but so does the stamping, which in combination makes a story in the end.

I'm really excited I got to experience batiking and stamping this week. I also loved hear the stories and information Nani had to tell us about his culture in Ghana. I wish we would of had more time to experiment with some other batik techniques such as using the wax drawing tool he showed us in class today, because it would have been fun to see the other ways of doing batik, but I'm grateful for the time we had with him. This was definitely one of my favorite cultural learning experiences so far.