Jane Steinberg
After receiving my Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History at Wellesley College, I wen to the University of Rome as a Fulbright Scholar
specializing in Italian Mannerist painting. The years in Italy strongly influenced my color sense, and my palette remains very close to that of the Italian
Renaissance painters. Trained as an art historian, as a dyer I am self-taught. I invented my mokume, or wood grain, shibori technique of dyeing silk, because I didn't know that it already existed. The price of my ignorance was that I spent a number of years building my own
crude road right next to the splendid highway that the Japanese had been traveling on for centuries.
When I first started dyeing silk, I was looking for ways to exploit its thermoplastic properties, to put shape,
texture and color into the fabric at the same time. I tried tying it with string, clamping it between boards, folding and sewing it, tying things into it, folding it and binding it, pleating it, wrapping it around pink plastic curlers--and I even experimented with home permanents to see if the silk (a protein like hair) would hold its shape. A friend who saw one of these early pieces said it looked like fabric by Mariano Fortuny. I had never heard of this giant in textile/fashion history.
Fortuny's pleated gowns had been a major influence in the early twentieth
century clothing revolution which had eliminated the corset as an absolute requirement of women's dress. I looked at all the Fortuny examples available in the costume collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I read everything I
could find about his process, essential parts of which were still not known at the time. It became clear that his pleating was not what I was looking to do, because it had too little to do with the actual
dye work.
Meanwhile, I continued experimenting with various resist/dye improvisations. I was making soft sculpture and wall hangings using whatever methods I could devise, including making dozens of dyed organza bubbles by tying silk around marbles and other small spheres. One day, I folded and sewed a piece of China silk with the idea of creating a ruffled diamond pattern, and
when I took the threads out after dyeing, I realized that I had at last come up
with the technique I needed. I had produced a shaped piece of silk with intricate contours and topography, and the color areas were just where I wanted them to be. It was only a matter of time until I figured out the system that I now use and which I learned much later is the Japanese dyer's art known as mokume shibori.
Over the years, I have produced whatever I could market as dyed goods, which
meant a lot of time spent doing ready-to-wear in my own fabrics. But I consider myself a dyer, not a clothing designer. I have almost totally stopped doing conventional fashions and am now concentrating on what I do best, which are things that depend on the beauty of the fabric alone. A Jane Steinberg scarf is no more than a simple rectangle of shimmering mutable color, a luminous envelope for a body. I am also now courting a longtime hidden love, home accessories such as pillows and
bedding, soft things of beauty to enhance interiors.
As it has been so truly said, color is how spirit enters matter. I want my work to be about color. That is where I find my joy, and now that I'm into my seventies, where my joy is, that's where I want to be.
Jane Steinberg's Shibori Technique
In order to control where dye enters fabric, thus creating a pattern, the dyer uses a "resist," something that will keep the dye out of
certain area while admitting it to others. The batik the resist is melted wax; in my shibori it is the fabric itself, folded so tightly the dye cannot penetrate between the folds. The folds are created by lengths of strong thread sewn by hand into the fabric at specific intervals.
For each scarf, white silk is cut to length, edged with silk thread and then hand-sewn with shibori threads. It is given its first dye, rinsed and dried. The shibori threads then are pulled up tightly and tied off. Thus a
45-inch width of silk is reduced to a tight mat of folds about a half inch think and three inches wide. The tied piece is then put into the second dye. How this second color penetrates the first color is controlled by how the dyer ties the shibori threads. After the second dye, the tied piece is washed and dried and the shibori threads are cut and pulled out.
Silk, like hair, is a protein filament, and like hair, it can be wet, set and dried. When the finished piece of silk is opened, it has the topography
of a mini-mountain range. The first color appears on the slopes and the second color appears on the ridges and in the valleys. the tiny needles holes
remaining are the brush strokes in this landscape, the marks of the dyer's hands.
The mokume ("wood grain") shibori I do is often confused with Fortuny pleating, yet it is nothing like it. My
shibori's basic structural unit is a flexible diamond shape that allows it to drape, wind and flow around curves. Pleating, made up of parallel ridges, cannot do any of that. Because in shibori the color and texture are put into the fabric at the same time, the
color both follows and defines the texture. Pleats, however, are superimposed on fabric and can relate only to rectilinear designs like stripes or plaids. And pleats are made by machines. Only hands can create shibori.
