Well, what fun. Catherine Ventura has done something totally unique with her Tokyo Rococo fabric. An artist and art educator living in Asia, Catherine has a huge background in textile arts among other things (she’s done everything!). I have also had the good fortune to have done several collaborative projects with her when we both lived in Taipei, one of which you can see if you scroll down…
For this project Catherine says she just enjoyed the patterns and how they played off of each other, and didn’t really think too much about which one to use because they all complimented each other without thought. (I like the sounds of that). The flags were cut, machine stitched and then washed and dried in the dryer to get that raggedy effect on the edges. The feathers were not washed and dried because of the delicate hand stitching. I love that she used the two colorways together, not an obvious choice. I also like the organic deconstructed feel of the pieces and I think the feathers are a bit of genius. Enjoy!
Ok, here we are, a collaborative piece Catherine and I did in…2005? 2006? It was for a show called “The Other Way” and we used the Chinese “Dao/Tao”, Japanese “do” which means “the way, the path”. Catherine and I were both using calligraphy in our work at the time, I using Japanese characters on paper with sumi ink, and she using Chinese characters on silk. For this project, we each made several flags in our respective mediums using variations on the character and then strung them up like a prayer flag with strips of the painted paper and silk in between. Luckily we made two strings so we could both walk away with one. 
Here is one of Catherine’s close up, where you can see that she paints on the silk, stamps it using Chinese chops and works the silk is a very cool way to form the characters.
