On Thursday September 24th Eric Broug presented his lecture: The Compass and The World about Islamic geometric design. The principles of pattern creation and tessellation were discussed with many examples from historic buildings throughout the world.

Tim McLaughlin introduced the evening with the following remarks:

Great systems can be made from simple elements.

For example, two simple instruments — a compass and a straight edge— have been used to build at least two great systems.

One of them is the subject of tonight’s lecture, and so as not to give the game away. I’m going to talk about the other.

About two-thousand, three hundred years ago. A man took up a compass and a straight edge and began to investigate shapes. What were the relationships between lines and points, circles, squares, triangles, polygons, and sections of these shapes?

This was, of course, the greek mathematician Euclid, who did not discover everything from scratch, but built on the work of previous thinkers and incorporated these insights into a system. And the system was perhaps more powerful than what it described. Today we call it Euclidian geometry, and this system was a set of arguments that established the proof of a theorem through deductive reasoning. The proofs worked backward, rigorously, until they reached indisputable axiomatic truths. Such as: A straight line is the shortest distance between any two points.

Two thousand years after Euclid, Isaac Newton will set down a series of proofs concerning the motions of heavenly bodies. Many of these are geometric proofs.

This system, built from these two instruments has a monolithic importance in human history. The importance of the system extends far beyond mathematics, as the moral and humanist thinkers of the enlightenment attempted to give their arguments traction by formulating them on the Euclidian model. The hope was that one’s ideas could be shown to be as necessarily true as a geometric proof.

What can be discovered through the use of a compass and a straight edge seems to reveal something fundamental about the world.

That’s the big picture. But what might happen if you use these two instruments to explore aesthetics? Architecture? Or Design? To answer that question Eric Broug has traveled from the UK to meet us.

As a young man Eric came to the realization that he wanted to find something that would interest him forever and give him a meaningful life. Inspired by the book Arabic Geometrical Pattern and Design he began to go deeper but no matter how far he dived, he was amazed to see fathomless depths still beneath him. In his own words: “I made a deal with myself that I would pursue it not as a hobby, but as a calling.”

For ten years, he worked with a compass, ruler, pencil and paper and tried to deconstruct the patterns in this book in order to be able to reconstruct them. He moved to London to get a formal education at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts. And next he moved to the School of Oriental and African Studies, in London, where he did his MA in the History of Islamic Art and Architecture.

He now lives in the North of England, where he works as a writer, educator, designer and artist. Please join me in welcoming Eric Broug.


Eric will teach three sold-out workshops while in Canada. We hope that he will return to visit us again soon. Here are some links to his resources.

Eric's Website:
http://www.broug.com/

Eric's TED lesson:
http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-complex-geometry-of-islamic-design-eric-broug

Eric's Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/eric.broug

I’d like to introduce a chemist by talking about physics. 

In particular I’d like to talk about how we talk about those things we cannot directly apprehend. 

Last night in Beverly Gordon’s lecture, string theory was mentioned. In particle physics, “string theory” is a theoretical framework which gains some explanatory power by considering one dimensional objects it calls “strings.” 

And this is interesting. Because we have no apprehension of sub-atomic particles … whatsoever. We discover them by experiment and we model them mathematically, but we can only understand them – form concepts about what they are like - in terms of human experience – that is, what we have seen, felt, heard, smelt, and tasted and the inferences we have made from these experiences. 

In physics, the difficulty of conceptualizing what was happening with really really tiny objects, came to a head with the great physicist, Neils Bohr, who, together with mathematician Werner Heisenberg, put together a set of principles that has come to be known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. I love that term “the Copenhagen Interpretation”– you can just picture a group of physicists sitting in a Danish cafe drinking tiny but incredibly strong coffees — talking about what constitutes reality at the sub-atomic level.

And the essence of the Copenhagen Interpretation is what I just mentioned in relation to String Theory. We can only understand particle physics in terms of human experience. Or to put it another way, our ability to explain natural phenomena is constrained by our ability to form concepts. 

The wave/particle duality of light is perhaps the most well-know example of this. On the level of objects that we can handle – baseballs and ponds for example – waves and particles are mutually exclusive concepts. It is contradictory to say one object behaves as both. But at the sub-atomic level, photons behave as both waves and particles. 

And because sub-atomic particles do not behave like macroscopic objects, physicists (not generally a whimsical lot) can be quite poetic when naming or describing them. For example, there are six flavours of quarks: up down, top, bottom (and my two favourite) strange and charm.

Let’s move on to chemistry. 

Our ability to explain natural phenomena is constrained by our ability to form concepts. This may be a familiar sensation to those of you with an interest in dye chemistry. How is it that sometimes a small change in your dye procedure can have such dramatic results? How is it that dyeing sometimes fails so completely? What is happening in there? We cannot see the molecules coming together or moving apart. We do not have a clear idea of what an ion is, how big or small it is, what shape it is, if it is heavy or light, brittle or soft. 

Our ability to explain natural phenomena is constrained by our ability to form concepts. 

We wish to understand the natural phenomena of the dye pot. And, luckily for us, there is someone who is gifted at forming the concepts that increase our understanding. Michel is not just a chemist – that is, someone who is fluent in the language of chemical diagrams and who understands the laws that govern chemical reactions. Rather he has a gift for metaphor and image, for analogy and comparison.

Wittgenstein once famously said, the limits of my language are the limits of my world.

Michel gives us the language to talk about and understand colour and its botanical sources. He has a deep sensitivity to the culture of natural dyes and he believes in the free sharing of information. And it is our great pleasure to welcome him to the Maiwa Textile Symposium once again.

Sivia Harding
Not To Be Missed Knitting Workshops with Sivia Harding

Knitter–designer–patternmaker–instructor...the list goes on. As the knitting world is well aware, Sivia Harding has made her mark. With a signature style incorporated into her patterns and taught in her workshops, Sivia is in demand across North America. With individual attention given to each participant, Sivia turns what might seem like the impossible–into the possible,  bringing out the full potential in each student.

Sivia Joins us from Milwaukee, USA to teach three not to be missed workshops.

Click on the links below to get more information about each workshop.

Decorative Mending
SOLD OUT
When knitting is used to mend knits, damaged areas can be transformed into beautiful and whimsical design elements. Use your imagination to choose colours and interesting stitches to embellish what was once a sad hole or worn elbow into a new object of pride.

Fitted Cowl Design
This workshop boils down the math that goes into round yoke cowls, capes, and sweaters, to a very simple and effective way to create top-down or bottom-up designs perfectly shaped to your individual measurements. They can be as simple in execution as a circular knitted tube, or a lovely blank canvas on which to project ideas such as colourwork, cables, texture, lace, or any combination for adornment. This is an “adventurous beginners” class. Students must know how to knit, purl, cast on, bind off, perform basic increases and decreases, and will have completed a project knit entirely in the round.

Uncommon Cowls: A Draped Approach
A creative laboratory to jump start people into designing–Uncommon Cowls bypasses the usual more mathematically-oriented design process and goes for a visual, hands-on approach using simple fabric shapes draped on a body or dummy in uncommon, unusual ways. This is an out-of-the-box, FUN class guaranteed to spur creative ideas for knitted items, and beyond. This is an “adventurous beginners” class. Students must know how to knit, purl, cast on, bind off, perform basic increases and decreases, and feel confident enough to make modifications to a knitting pattern.

India will be teaching a sold-out workshop while in Vancouver. 2015 marks the second year that we have been fortunate enough to have India as one of our international instructors.

The next lecture is Monday September 21 - Beverly Gordon's sold out presentation: "The Fabric of our Lives: Why Textiles Matter."

As we are writing this post we still have some tickets available for Michel Garcia's "Field Notes in the Colour Garden" on Tuesday September 22nd.

Dorothy Caldwell working with red ochres in Australia.

Last night Canadian artist Dorothy Caldwell opened the Maiwa Textile Symposium with her lecture "In Place." The title of her lecture is taken from one of her large scale textile works, however it could equally well describe her method of working which is deeply tied to a sense of creating a personal cartography.

Here is Tim McLaughlin's introduction to the lecture:

A collection of found objects arranged in the Canadian Arctic.

Dorothy introduced the audience to a history of her work from her early days moving to Hastings, Ontario, to her recent exhibition Silent Ice | Deep Patience which is touring Canada. It was an evocative lecture for everyone, but it had especially deep meanings for many of the textile artists in the audience.

For those who could not attend last night's lecture, a sense of Drorthy's talk is contained in this short interview produced by Media Arts Peterborough. (note: if you are reading this post in your email you may have to open it in a web browser to load the video.):



Tonight (Friday September 11) is the opening of "Selected Innovations - The Inspiring Legacy of Junichi Arai and Nuno" at the Silk Weaving Studio on Granville Island (6 - 8pm). There is no charge for this event. The show will run until September 24, 2015.

Barbara Todd
With one foot planted firmly in the world of craft and one foot in the world of art, Barbara Todd works through personal and social issues with her quilts. Using historical stitch patterns overlaid on quiet fabric and minimally detailed, Barbara binds simple traditions with simple images creating profound statements about the complexities of life. 

Traditionally quilts have layers of cloth–Barbara’s quilts are constructed with not only cloth, but also layers of meaning. Every stitch binds her ideas into the cloth that she carefully chooses. Barbara divides her time between New York, and Montreal–where she teaches Studio Art at Concordia University–her work is featured in museums, private collections and in large-scale public commissions, in Canada and the U.S. An interdisciplinary artist best known for her innovative, quilted textile works, Barbara marries a minimalist aesthetic to a poetic and politicized sensibility. 

A few spaces have opened up in her four day workshop from October 6th-9th where participants will create collage squares, exploring how individual fabrics and combinations work together through colour and contrast.

Don’t miss this chance to learn from one of North America’s leading textile artists and instructors. Barbara will also be giving a lecture Stone Drawings and Quilted Lines on Monday, October 5th.

The first event of the 2015 Maiwa Textile Symposium is next week.
This is a free event being held at the Silk Weaving Studio on Granville Island
Tuesday September 8th 6 - 8 pm.