Crafts Council Nederland invited four maker-designers to travel to Kyushu, Japan, to explore the shared heritage of the Netherlands and Japan in the field of indigo dye during a crafts exchange.
The emerging talents Liselore Frowijn and Adrianus Kundert, along with the more experienced maker-designers Maaike Gottschal and Aliki van der Kruijs, apprenticed with Japanese masters in September 2016 and explored new applications for indigo.
The results were presented during Dutch Design Week from October 22 to 30, 2016, at the Kazerne in the center of Eindhoven and in November at the old Dutch trading post Dejima in Japan.
Background
Indigo: Sharing blue is a shared heritage project about indigo and its use for textile techniques that originated in Japan and in the Netherlands in period 1650 from 1850 (Edo period and part of the Dutch East India Company period). At that time the use of blue dye was immensely popular in both countries. Indigo came from Asia to the Netherlands and spread all over Europe. In Japan indigo is still being used, in Europe dying with indigo disappeared with the invention of a synthetic dye.
Now a day crafts are still imbedded in society in Japan, it is a part of its traditional culture, but the crafts are not being reinvented. In the Netherlands knowledge of techniques is slowly disappearing, but there is plenty of innovation. This crafts exchange is a great opportunity for both cultures to learn from each other.
400 years Holland-Kyushu
On Kyushu, the second largest island of Japan, the Netherlands and Japan first met in the seventeenth century. Besides economic and political interests, which sometime collided with one another, a mutual creative curiosity arose and still exists today. In 2016 and 2017, this is celebrated with the cultural collaboration programme Holland-Kyushu. The initiators of this program are the Dutch consultancy and organizer for international cultural collaboration DutchCulture, and the Dutch embassy in Tokyo and the Consulate General in Osaka.
