Ikat at Bikaner House

Ikat samples from World Ikat Textiles: Ties that Bind

Ikat weaving, artists begin by dying unwoven yarns at prescribed intervals; when the yarns are woven to form a cloth, elaborate patterns and motifs emerge. It was exciting to see World Ikat Textiles: Ties that Bind, an exhibition of Ikat textiles at the Bikaner House in Delhi. The small but dense show surveyed Ikat styles from India and abroad. Samples ranged from elegantly minimal geometric designs to highly detailed figurative images. Some employed Double Ikat, a method in which both warp and weft yarns are dyed to create the pattern of the cloth.

While seemingly painstaking and methodical, the Ikat process struck me as also very painterly. As I examined the dense construction of color and pattern in each fabric, my attention moved fluidly between surface and structure. I wanted to understand the internal layers of thread and their interactions, the relations of part to whole and process to product, much the way I often find myself relating to a painting through its facture; meaning and feeling emerge from understanding the compressed layers of a painting’s physical body. Closely viewing Ikat, like painting, invites a process of visual dissemblance, wherein the eye cannot help but pull pattern apart thread by thread.