Photo: Jill Kitchener (Textile Museum of Canada)
I went to visit the Textile Museum of Canada a couple of weeks ago
as I happened to be in Toronto for a long weekend. What a treat!
It's smaller than I imagined, but they had a couple of great
exhibits - Silk Oasis on the Silk Road and Magic Squares: The Patterened Imagination of
Muslim Africa in Contemporary Culture. The first exhibit was
far more fascinating to me, but the second also had some beautiful
things.
The first exhibit was all about silk - embroidered silks and ikat -
mostly coats and wall hangings. As I walked through, all I could
keep saying to myself was "wow." It was my first time to the
museum, and I love the fact that they don't put anything behind
glass - you get to take off your glasses and peer at the embroidery
as closely as you like without touching it. I wasn't the only one
doing this, thank god, so I didn't feel like too much
of a twit. Some of the coats they had were really, really
magnificent - partly embroidered, partly velveted, and fully
beautiful. The coat picture below was my absolute favourite. SImply
stunning. Someone want to make me one like that?
Photo: Jill Kitchener (Textile Museum of Canada)
This is a close-up photo of one of the wall-hangings. Appliqué!
Really, it puts mine to shame.
After the silk extravaganza, I went and checked out the Magic
Squares exhibit. I had no idea what magic squares were - apparently
they are squares of numbers that become magical and meaningful
to people. When people wear fabric containing magic squares,
they become powerful and are protected. An example of a magic
square is actually Soduko! The fabrics didn't have actual numbers
on them (although I'm sure there is a market for cute raincoats
covered in Soduko puzzles that you can finish in a dry erase
marker over and over again...). The fabrics of the coats, blankets,
and hats had representations of the magic squares by way
of symbols or patterns which protected the wearer. The exhibit
showed a number of historical garments from Africa that were quite
stunning, but the majority of the exhibit was given over to four
modern artists' interpretations of magic squares - not so
interesting. One example of the historical garments is below -
the circles represented the numbers within a square, linked in a
way that made it protective for the wearer. The brown "seeds" are
representative of the land and are emboidered onto the white
fabric.
But the best part of the museum? Well, second best, after the
bookstore.... The room called Fibrespace where "guests are
introduced, in both physical and tactile ways, to the many ways
textiles influence their lives." Hello!!!!! They had all sorts of
fabrics to touch and play with, little looms for people to practice
weaving, instructional exercises to teach people about fabrics, and
a guessing game where you look at the raw materials and try to
determine which fabric they make. I think the room was set up for
kids, but hey, no one else was in there, so I totally played and
explored! This is my bad non-flash phone photo of the boxes of raw
materials. Guess what the one in the middle (bottom) is??!
What a great little museum. Definitely check it out if you are
in the Toronto area!!