Alaya Ang
The Fingers Pulling The Thread
Edinburgh Arts Festival 2024, City Art CentreCalico, gambiered silk, cotton, river esk mud, soil and shale rock, rice field mud, ceriops tagal, jackfruit heartwood, fire flame bush, oak gallnut powder, symplocos cochinchinensis leaf powder, pu’er tea, soy milk, florida water, cotton and polyester thread, LED tube lights
A floor-based textile piece featuring a collection of hand-dyed textiles. These textiles are dyed using mud / soil, a reflection on a particular dyeing technique from Guangdong, of which the artist’s matrilineal family can be traced back to, that finishes fabric with river mud from the iron-rich Pearl River Delta.
Mud-Dyeing
Wearing mud-dyed clothing is significant for Cantonese people, especially those who have left their homes, as a way to carry a piece of the land with them. The clothing acts as a vessel of memory embodying the landscapes, stories, and journeys of its people.
Two of these pieces have been dyed from soil collected from the River Esk near Ironmills Park and the Shale Bings in West Lothian. Within this context, there is another intricate relationship present, between industry and river ecosystems, as iron oxides and other metal runoffs from historical mining activities continue to leak into waters.
West Lothian Shale Bings, locally called bings, these piles of waste rock are remnants of shale mining that occurred between 1851 and 1963
River patterns sewn into the fabric provides insight to the artist’s family name 洪 (Ang), that signifies "flood" or "vast waters,". The name originated from communities living near rivers and lakes, who developed expertise in flood control and irrigation.
Guidance (The Way of an Ancestor) traces paths, diverted lines, and afterlives, and is dedicated to Alaya’s grandmother and uncle. The patterns are embroidered on joss paper, used in ancestral worship as spirit money. The burning of spirit money is the last ritual performed by a family member during a traditional funeral ceremony to ensure a favourable outcome in the afterlife.
The collection of sounds, of cutting, of sewing machines and everyday interchanges are contributions from the artist's family who run a tailoring shop in Singapore.
Special thanks to Meg Jenkins for sound design
Participative Archiving
Audience members were invited to add to the work by drawing / sewing a pattern that reminded them of
A terrain,
A fracture pattern,
A timeline, or
A water channel
A collaborative workshop with SCOREscotland women’s group to contribute to the creation process, sharing their skills and stories, also became part of the material narrative.
This work is the second part of a longer-term project The Sea, the Heat, The Rope and The Fingers Pulling the Thread, a series of work that investigates matrilineal and genderqueer genealogies. Each cumulative form is an invitation to relationality by meandering through different material discoveries and processes.