I am David van Buskirk and my tapestry was inspired by a yarn called Kibiso Silk. It is a stiff gnarled yarn spun from the discarded outer layers of silk cocoons and was developed to eliminate waste in silk manufacturing by Reiko Sudo, a Japanese contemporary textile designer. Through experimentation, I found that the inflexible silk yarn easily held loops without collapsing, which reminded me of an abstract drawing I’d done years ago that represented my struggle in practicing Zen meditation. The perimeter of the original drawing was a chaotic tangle filled with dense scribbles (much like my thoughts as I began to meditate). In the drawing, the lines gradually dissolved into a space of calm emptiness at the center. I discovered that the silk yarn’s texture and stiffness effectively conveyed the quality of the drawing’s densely tangled scribbles with astonishing dimension.
For the tapestry’s base I employed a Swedish weft inlay technique called “HV,” which produces long filling floats that I could push to extremes by looping the Kibiso silk around the raised warp, with alternate picks of plain weave stabilizing and securing the loops. At the periphery I looped the heavier yarn in dense configurations, then gradually reduced the heavy silk towards the center, introducing a finer Kibiso silk while continuously reducing the size and presence of the loops to produce a flat weave that gradually disappeared into the smooth texture at the tapestry’s center. The dense tangles at the periphery gradually dissolve into a place of quiet equanimity and space, the destiny of an unquiet mind questing for a place of peace.
My use of color serves as an analogue to the unfolding mental processes and emergent affect states that one encounters in meditation: Murky ruminations on the periphery give way to a cacophony of textures in brilliant hues that dazzle the senses, dissolving at the center into a rich, iridescent matrix of calm.