Maradadi is a Swahili word meaning ‘beautiful’. I spent the first seven years of my life in Kenya. The abundance of wildlife encountered then impressed upon me the boundless variety and beauty of the natural world. Using the ancient techniques of Shibori pattern making and the equally ancient process of indigo dyeing appeals to my desire to express inward feelings but to tread softly on the way.
Shibori is a Japanese word meaning ‘squeezed’. Fabric is manually resisted by folding, tying, clamping, and stitching to create patterns. In Japan the earliest examples of cloth dyed with a shibori technique date from the 8th century.
Indigo the famous blue is obtained from the leaves of plants in the genus Indigofera. Indigofera tinctoria is used in India while a different plant, Persicaria tinctoria in the family Polygonaceae is widely used in Asia, China and Japan.
I discovered shibori and indigo dyeing at a workshop in Melbourne with the amazing Yoshiko Wada. For many years I had been searching for a way of expressing my creative vision without satisfaction until that day. Since then I have studied Shibori with Jane Callender and indigo dyeing with Michel Garcia and Aboubakar Fofana.
