Rie Tachikawa Interview _hot_ [Premium ★]

(Laughs) That is very true. I was never interested in the body as a thing to be wrapped. I am interested in the negative space —the air between the body and the room. Most textile artists ask, "How does this feel on the skin?" I ask, "How does this define the air around the skin?"

That series was born from frustration. In Japan, we have this word "ma" (間)—the pause, the interval. I wanted to see if I could make the interval physical. I took industrial felt—something hard, used for machinery—and cut slits into it. Then I wove copper wire through the slits, pulling it tight until the felt buckled. rie tachikawa interview

Most beginners think weaving is about repetition. It is not. It is about decision . Every time the shuttle passes, you are saying "yes" to one texture and "no" to a thousand others. I wanted them to feel the loneliness of that decision. (Laughs) That is very true

In this previously unpublished interview from 2018, we sat down with Tachikawa in her Atelier in Setagaya, Tokyo, to discuss how she un-wove the rules of contemporary craft. Most textile artists ask, "How does this feel on the skin

And remember: The most important part of a woven thing is the hole. The light that passes through. The gap. Don't fill every gap. Let the air in. Rie Tachikawa passed away in 2019, but her pieces remain in the permanent collections of the Museum of Arts and Design (New York) and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Kanazawa). Her students continue her seminar on "Critical Textiles," proving that even when the thread breaks, the pattern remains.

The "violence" you see is the tension between the soft and the rigid. The felt wants to lay flat; the copper wants to spring back. That struggle is the art. In the end, the pieces looked like topographical maps of an earthquake. I think that is the truest map of Tokyo: a city always trying to hold itself together while the ground moves.