Why weave?

Michelle posed a very interesting question in a comment on yesterday’s blog post:

Do you weave because you have a passion to weave? Or, is weaving a modus operandi for your art?

An excellent question.  I thought about it for awhile today, and concluded that the answer is YES!

First and foremost, I weave because I enjoy weaving.  I love sitting at my loom and transforming thread into cloth. I love the design process, the tactile joy of touching yarns, the magical moment when warp and weft intermingle to produce – miracle of miracles! – woven fabric.  I enjoy every step of weaving, from planning to wet-finishing.  I weave because I love it.

But I also want to use my weaving to advance my creative goals.  If I were to give you a “mission statement” for my life, it would be, “I want to create work of awesome beauty and power.  I want to make _____ the way that Itchiku Kubota created kimono.”

(If you missed the first act, my blog post on Itchiku Kubota’s amazing kimono – and the inspiration I got from it – can be found here.)

I’m still struggling to find my medium.  Weaving will definitely be a part of it, because I love to weave.  But I don’t think that weaving alone will let me express the things I want to express, or create the things I want to create – it will most likely be a combination of weaving and something else.  Dyeing?  Sewing?  Quilting?  All of the above?  I don’t know yet.  But I am looking for a way to meld weaving with other techniques in a way that is complementary to all of them, that takes the best of each technique and fuses them into something brilliant, expressive – something greater than any of those techniques alone.  This is why I am meditating on the role of weaving in art, and how it plays into design.

And this, more than anything else, is what I want to do with my life: make something – anything! – the way Itchiku Kubota made kimono.