Indigo Colour Mixture

Japanese American textile artist Tomie Nagano explores the perceived simplicity, frugality, and inventiveness of earlier generations in her quilt making. Reverently recycling old clothing or kimono, Nagano quilts to honor her great-grandparents, farmers who settled in Hokkaido in northern Japan in the late 19th century. Out of necessity, many Japanese people at this time patched their work clothes many times over, inspiring Nagano to hand stitch all of her work.

Nagano chose the Log Cabin pattern for this quilt, because its square blocks are formed from stacks of rectangular pieces that echo the rudimentary houses that her great-grandparents’ generation built in Hokkaido. The thousands of pieces of indigo cloth manifest the importance of this dye to rural working-class people throughout the world. The most common dye before industrialization in the early 1900s, indigo cloth was thought to ward off insects and snakes, making it a natural choice for farmers and other rural pioneers, like the artist’s ancestors.