Boro  is a Japanese word meaning tattered clothes that are patched or mended.  The beauty is in the fabric’s imperfection which aesthetically becomes more appealing over time. 

Originally, during the Edo period of Japanese history (1603-1868), only the lower class people could wear the Boro colors which included blues, grays, blacks, and browns.  Later, in the Edo period, indigo blue became quite fashionable and has remained popular to this day.¹

Farmers and fishermen wore natural dyed indigo because they thought it had magical properties and protected them from mosquitoes and snakes.²  Firemen wore indigo because it does not burn.

I first saw Boro (antique Japanese indigo-dyed cotton textiles from the countryside) three years ago and it has been an inspiration for my artwork ever since.  Textures from old fabric remnants from my grandmother are transferred or drawn onto etching plates and then printed on paper and silk.  They are then stitched together in free form to make collages.  Some of my Boro designs also include my grandmother’s  sketches.  Those sketches were printed using solarplate  and sumi ink.

¹David Sorgato, BORO, maphalda edizioni, Milano, Italy, p.7 (2004)
²Wendy Moonan, Japanese Coats of Many Colors, The New York Times Friday, March 22, 2002

When I started working at the Japanese print gallery five years ago, I discovered  some worm eaten Japanese book pages in an antique woodblock print book in the gallery storage area.

I was fascinated looking at the nature of the paper.  Wormholes usually make old prints less valuable.  However, for an artist like me, they have become wonderful materials for my artwork.  These irregular mushi-kui  have subtle, delicate textural beauty.  I am very interested in working with the tactile quality and simplicity, which relates to the wabi –sabi* aesthetic from Japan.

I have worked on this collage series over the last ten months.  It has been peaceful and meditative for me to work on these collage pieces.  The one hundred year old book, from which the wormhole pages came, talks about the history  of Japan.  While making my collages, I imagined I was traveling through the Mushi-kui   to visit different time periods in the past.

*Wabi- Sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic.  It is the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.  Wabi is the beauty to be found in spareness and simplicity.

My grandmother’s nickname is Baba.  Baba started sewing when she was around forty years old.  It was  after World War ll when there were not enough clothes for her three children.    As a child, I always watched my grandmother sewing clothes for our family.  Threads, needles, buttons, wooden bobbins and fragments of cloth were my favorite toys.  I used to imitate her sewing with them.  Now as an artist, I use stitching with thread as a form of drawing in my collages.

Baba is ninety four years old now. Every time I visit her in Tokyo, the fabrics and dress patterns which she had drawn by hand with pencils are passed on to me for my artwork. 

Recently, I started to experiment with printing using etched plate on silk kimono fabric.  I then sewed these fabric prints together with my prints on paper and old early 20th century remnants of Japanese katagami  stencils.   The stencils have a rich dark brown color because they were soaked in persimmon juice to strengthen them for use as stencils. Over time, the color becomes darker the more the stencil is used.