Weaving for Everyone: A Liberating Experience of Self-Reflection Interview by NSN Team Photography by NSN Team, Erna Janine and Claudia Grace Laxton Netherlands, Iceland, Mongolia, India and Japan: a mixture of deep experiences has marked the formation of Erna Janine, a professional weaver who specialises in the Saori technique. In this interview, Erna Janine tells us a little bit about her background and about the Saori philosophy, which reminds us about being free to explore without fixed schemes, get inspired also by the mistakes that we make along the way, as all humans do, thus making weaving a craft for everyone.
Hello Erna Janine, thank you for taking the time to talk to me. First of all tell me a bit about you? Where do you come from? I was born in the Netherlands in the mid-seventies. Both my parents were born in small farming and fishing villages some time before the second world war. The atmosphere in our home reflected this, my mother made most of our clothes, most of the vegetables came from the garden and there was a certain reluctance towards “modern stuff”. My grandmother lived a long life in the province of Zeeland and was one of the last remaining women to sport the traditional costume there. During time spent at her home in the summer, I often observed her getting ready in the morning, a complicated process of folding and pinning down specific pleats. The Dutch Traditional costume varied from village to village and was always hand-made. Different days required different colours schemes and big life events would be expressed by the wearing of specific outfits for each occasion, often along with gravity defying headwear and “head-jewellery”. Keeping the layers of clothing in good nick demanded constant attention; not much was left open to speculation. It was only during a visit to the blockprint museum in Jaipur last year, that I realised the cloth I
had alway identified with Dutch rural costume had actually been produced and hand-printed in India, indeed the red, white and blue are the most common block print colours there. I see from your website that you have worked with natural textiles for over 20 years, can you tell me why you decided to work with natural materials rather than choosing manmade fibres? I believe that the difference between manmade and natural materials tends to be more conspicuous in the extremes. A piece of woven silk hand dyed with natural colours will become more beautiful and characterful with time, a piece of polyester will not. But there are overlaps, and often although something is natural, it could have still been produced under harsh conditions or come at a severe cost to the earth, such as cotton for instance. I like to weave with paper yarns from Japan at the moment, these are highly processed, mostly unnatural and have had to travel a long way to my studio in the Cotswolds, but they are still perceived to be fairly natural. What kinds of natural materials do you work with? And
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