For the first time, I saw a loom from a neighbor. At that time we lived in a two-story wooden hut, and from the windows there was a view of apple and plum trees, front gardens and sheds. There were 20, maybe 25 such houses on our street, each with a pair of entrances and two or three apartments per floor. A small urban-type settlement where everyone knew each other, just like in the Moscow area.
Nadezhda Ivanovna, a good-natured old woman, remembered her life in the countryside. It was from there that she had both a spinning wheel and a loom.
“Let me show you how the shuttle goes,– she beckoned to me. I was amazed to see how the threads intertwined, how they transformed into a single whole, and how the drawing was born. And so, yarn rolled out of a pile of fluffy sheep’s wool, which Nadezhda Ivanovna tucked into the loom, and after a while towels and tablecloths appeared in her house.
I didn’t make a dressmaker. At school, in labor lessons, I sewed myself a sun skirt and an apron once, put them on once and forgot about it like a terrible dream. I was more interested in intertwining letters with each other, rolling them into sentences and the process of creating word canvases.
I admired the skill of the weavers from a distance, observing a safe distance, their products were either put on or hung on the walls.
Once again, my interest in this type of art was aroused by the opening of the Silk Factory Laboratory museum in Kolomna, Moscow region. Then my friend and I set off to conquer the Kolomna expanses, idly exploring merchant and artisan life away from the hustle and bustle of the capital. We were told the 200-year-old story of an almost circumnavigation of the world and the return of the kanavaty veil. By the way, since the end of the 18th century, Kolomna, along with Moscow and St. Petersburg, was the center for the production of silk fabrics and, until the 1840s, the main place for the production of fluted veils.
In the museum, you could try to depict something yourself – during the tour, you could weave something from yarn as a souvenir. But we decided to focus only on photographing behind the loom. In our opinion, it is quite acceptable to popularize the type of manual labor. Perhaps the grandchildren, years later, having stumbled upon these photos, will wonder what their grandmother was doing behind a huge incomprehensible thing, they will go online and find clever words, or maybe they will want to try to weave something.
I went to Tsaritsyno with prejudice: what didn’t I see there? Why open two exhibitions at once, it seems, devoted to completely different types of art: one – textile art, modern tapestry, and the second – the Sverdlovsk jewelry school of authors. I was late, and my sister was already there, informing me of the group’s movements.
– We leave the palace and go to the garden.
On the way, I came across several art objects from the Triennial of Textile Art and Modern Tapestry. Across the bridge, opposite the Bread House, above the ravine, was the “Mammothus” by artist Pavel Elfimov. This prehistoric baby mammoth, woven from jute rope, symbolizing moments and time, fits very well into the landscape of the park. Across the path, Elena Molchanovskaya’s sculpture “Accordion Player” made of artificial rattan is positioned in a comfortable position. And a little further away, the foundation of the historical soap opera was transformed by the work of Katerina Lime-Blossom “hints of wholeness”, which is an interweaving of yarn and, according to the author’s idea, connects the past and the future. How can you not remember the thread of Ariadne and the hero Theseus? But here anyone can walk through the maze without risking their lives.
Evgenia Evart’s installation “Under Water”, made of recycled plastic, was installed in the Milovida pavilion. Fish from bottles floating on waves made of polyethylene. The artist considers water as the basis of life and draws attention to the environmental problem, in particular, that plastic everywhere clogs reservoirs.
Alexandra Ostrovskaya’s “Portal II” was bobbing in the waters of the Upper Tsaritsyn Pond. During the time of Catherine the Great, plays were staged here, folk festivals were also held here, and the artist suggested that a portal connecting worlds and epochs might appear here.
There are seven installations throughout the park, each of which reveals the designated theme of the Triennial. This year, we have chosen a very poetic and multi-layered title: “Diversity of connections. Threads, breaks, connections.”
“The first hall is dedicated to breaking and restoring ties, the second one explores the connection of opposites. The third hall represents the biological connections of man with nature, and the fourth is dedicated to inner connections with oneself,” said Anna Karganova, curator of the Triennial. There are eight halls in total for the competition program and five more for the non–competition program.
Visitors are greeted by Alexandra Zamurueva’s video work “And the path of the beginning lies through the end” – the screens show how the artist creates a work, and then unwinds it, which symbolizes the philosophy of creativity and the cyclical nature of life.
By the way, the selection of the participants of the fifth Triennial took eight months – from February to October 2023. Artists from Russia and abroad (Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan and other countries) sent 175 works. The competition program included more than 80 works: 7 large-scale installations for the park area, 32 modern textile objects and 43 traditional tapestries. Most of the works are exclusive, and the artists created them specifically for the event. The main condition is manual work. Here you will find classic smooth-woven tapestries, textile sculptures, and art objects created from non-traditional materials for weaving.
The artists reflected on the interaction of man and nature, the philosophy of manual labor in the 21st century, the preservation of traditions and ties with the clan. For example, the Argentinean Julian Pesce in his work “Jacquard” fantasized about man and mechanical intermediaries in creativity. In fact, this is a reference to Joseph Marie Jacquard, who invented the machine that revolutionized weaving. The work is black and white: two colors mean 1 and 0 in the programming language. The Jacquard device was the first programmable machine tool, hence the binary calculus system.
And “The Souls of the forest. Connections” by Belarusian artist Kristina Vysotskaya seems to be transported to a fabulous space with blue tree trunks closely connected to each other. The author draws an analogy between the ecosystem of the forest and the unified digital and information field in which modern man exists.
“Textiles are a material that has accompanied people throughout their lives. In the works of artists, textiles have become an expressive and lively language,” the curator shared her thoughts. Some works can be touched, they were specially made tactile.
The second exhibition “Ural: metal and stone” is more like a treasure trove of gems or a paradise for connoisseurs of jewelry art. This is the first such exhibition in more than half a century in Moscow. Her curator Sergey Vinokurov came from Yekaterinburg to talk about the traditions of Russian craftsmen. I sometimes imagined nimble lizards from the tale of the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, but this was probably due to the lack of lighting, which mostly illuminated the exhibits, rather than the girls wandering with their mouths open with lust. Actually, such a reaction from the ladies is not surprising, because there are works of art created in a single copy, sometimes taking the form of an ornate shell, a delicate flower, a fluttering butterfly, an elegant jug, or even a successful fisherman.
As in the triennial, the exhibition is an experiment with material and form. According to the curator, a characteristic feature of the author’s jewelry art of the 1980s and 1990s is the expansion of the arsenal of artistic means. Colored stone no longer played an important role at that time, and constructive and plastic experiments became one of the popular trends in jewelry art. For example, jewelers Vladislav Khramtsov, Vladimir Ustyuzhanin, Sergey Pinchuk, Vladimir Vetrov and Timargali Yamaletdinov combine metals that were unconventional for that time, for example, titanium and steel, with stone inserts or faceted gems.
– Well, let’s go through our treasures? – the sister suggested, meaning that it’s time and honor to know. But I understood that the immersion in beauty had taken place and I would surely return here before the fall, before the end of the exhibitions.