Hanging by Many Threads
When artist Jacob Hashimoto was approached by textile manufacturer Maharam about a collaboration more than a decade ago, he admits to “dropping the ball”.
It’s not that Hashimoto didn’t go on to work with Maharam – he created two installations for the company, Silent Rhythm (2011) and The Long Passage Towards Night (2012), both of which are now available as photographic wall coverings – but the possibility of designing a woven textile drifted. “It seemed like a missed opportunity for a long time, but I really didn’t have the [graphic] language to do this back then,” he shrugs.
Based in New York, Hashimoto’s studio is known for its architectural-scale, three-dimensional installations intricately constructed from translucent rice paper kites that are hung from webs of black thread. These kites have cascaded down the ceiling of McDonald’s in Chicago and spanned the lobby of the US Embassy in Namibia, yet as the studio’s renown and commercial appeal has grown, it “has gradually moved towards flatter explorations,” says Hashimoto. “We’ve adapted our art to everything from bicycles to video games.” As such, when the opportunity to revisit a textile with Maharam resurfaced, Hashimoto was quick to pick up the ball.
The first results of this revived collaboration, launched this year, are Midair and Beyond, two new textile series that translate Hashimoto’s rhythmic arrangements in space into patterns woven in cotton, nylon, and polyester yarn. “There was always a curiosity to translate Jacob’s very multidisciplinary creations, that range from paintings to sculptures, into woven textile,” says Ashley Smith, a senior designer at Maharam Design Studio. To explore this curiosity, Maharam’s team “has been working with Jacob to make digital products that are scalable and reproducible”.
Across both series, Hashimoto’s three-dimensional arrangement of kites and motifs are condensed into iterative patterns. Midair, for instance, features occasionally overlapping circles suspended in expansive space. The circles are adorned with abstract motifs selected from a visual diary that Hashimoto’s studio has developed over the years, studying and recording patterns ranging from the cellular structure of trees through to fungus outgrowths in the wild.
Realising the dense layering of Hashimoto’s chosen patterns as textiles required considerable technical expertise. “To achieve the desired effect of transparency when a motif-ed circle interacts with an empty one, the digital ‘weave file’ feeds information into the Jacquard loom such that it uses a nylon filament yarn to create a finer texture in that common area,” explains Smith. “It sounds complicated, I know, but it works smoothly,” she laughs.
The machine-woven translations of Hashimoto’s sculptural work may convert their spatial properties into two-dimensional patterns, but the textiles are now set to re-enter three dimensions in the form of furniture upholstery and wall hangings. According to Hashimoto, the textiles have great potential as building blocks for new spaces and other projects. “It’s about letting go and seeing how the creations live in this world,” he says. “I might see them on a waiting room sofa.”
Words Rupal Rathore
Photograph Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #37. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.