To quote the museum's descriptive card:
"Boro Blankets, 1860 - 1920, Asia, Japan
Pieces of fabric sewn as patchwork
Variable dimensions
Donation by M. Daniel Cordier in 2010
On loan from the National Museum of Art/ Center of Industrial Creation, Paris
The word boro, from boroghi, which means rags, is used for Japanese textile creations similar to patchworks. This habit was born out of necessity around 1860 during a period of great scarcity that led most of Japan into poverty. Studies though, have revealed that the peasants, and particularly women, who sewed these pieces together to create new clothes and upholstery had an aesthetic drive.
Boros can be several inches thick, for overtime a piece is torn or damaged, another one is sewn to cover it. An evidence of the peasant's poverty, they were despised at first, until collector's got interested in them because of the complexity of the indigo-blue range of colors. Every piece of fabric, every rag in the boro is similar to a word in a sentence, a tale or a story. "
End quote
The picture below is a close up of the boro above, which illustrates the point about the many layers. The materials began life as hand woven, hand died fabrics, their last lives lived in these boros. Such a density of texture and color, wear and use. How could such materials not attain a character of their own, to be reborn, live and die again as part of a larger purpose?
Les Abattoirs, on the Garonne River in Toulouse, is a former slaughterhouse, now the venue for the most humble of folk fabric creations, from the collection of the National Museum of Art/ Center of Industrial Creation, Paris.
The humble, the crude, the despised, the bad smelling, transcended to beauty, light, art.
http://www.lesabattoirs.org/en/les-abattoirs/about-les-abattoirs
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