The Archive — Notes on a piece

A stencil held together by silk

This is a katagami — a Japanese paper stencil, cut by hand and held together with a net of silk thread. It is the tool that dyed cloth, and it works on the same principle as the screen that prints this shirt.
Katagami · Japan · late 19th–early 20th c. · Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
A Japanese katagami paper stencil with a flying-fish motif
"Katagami, Flying Fish," Japan, late 19th–early 20th century. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 1946-104-8 (museum purchase through gift of Norvin Hewitt Green). Public domain / CC0.

This sheet is a tool, not a picture. It is a katagami — a Japanese stencil, cut by hand for dyeing cloth. What you see is the part cut away; where the paper remains, it holds the dye back.1 To make a summer yukata, a dyer laid a stencil like this on cotton, pushed rice paste through the openings, dipped the cloth in indigo and washed the paste off — leaving the pattern in white on blue.2

Paper that behaves like cloth

The stencil is built like plywood: layers of mulberry paper cured with fermented persimmon juice, so it is waterproof and has no weak seam to tear along.3 The finest cuts would drop out on their own, so they are held by itoire — a web of silk threads laid across the back and fixed in the same persimmon tannin.4 This piece has it. And the person who cut the stencil and the person who dyed the cloth were different trades: this is the cutter's work, the tool before the textile.5

The same principle as the screen

Look at what it is: a cut stencil, backed by a mesh of silk, pressed to cloth to reserve a pattern. That is the principle of the silkscreen, and in 1941 a manual of screen printing called the Japanese stencil “the nearest early prototype” of the process.6 The modern process was patented in Manchester in 1907.7 Nobody has shown that one descends from the other, and we do not claim it. When Japan opened, katagami were shipped to Europe by the thousand and read there not as tools but as art — feeding Art Nouveau, the Wiener Werkstätte, Tiffany.8

Anonymous by trade

There is no signature. Ise-katagami — the stencils of Shiroko, near Suzuka — are a craft of workshop and town, documented since at least the sixteenth century, and the carving is now protected as an Important Intangible Cultural Property.9 No name to misattribute; only the hand and the cut.

The tool that made textiles, made into a textile. The flying fish is the cut, and nothing is redrawn — and the shirt is printed on the same principle as the very thing it pictures.

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Katagami · $39 founders price
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Notes & sources

  1. A katagami is a Japanese paper stencil for resist-dyeing textiles (katazome); the motif is the cut-away openwork. Cooper Hewitt.
  2. Rice-paste resist pushed through the stencil; the cloth dyed — indigo suits absorbent cotton — and washed, leaving the pattern in white. Cooper Hewitt.
  3. Layers of mulberry (kōzo) washi cured with persimmon tannin (kakishibu). Ise-katagami.
  4. Itoire: a net of silk threads reinforcing the fragile cuts; present in this piece. Cooper Hewitt materials line; Ise-katagami.
  5. The stencil-carver and the dyer were historically separate crafts. Ise-katagami.
  6. A stencil reinforced with a silk mesh, laid on cloth. J. I. Biegeleisen and E. J. Busenbark, The Silk Screen Printing Process (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1941), pp. 1–3: “the nearest early prototype.”
  7. Modern screen-printing was patented by Samuel Simon, Manchester, 1907.
  8. Katagami exported to Europe after Japan opened, influencing Art Nouveau, the Wiener Werkstätte and Tiffany; the MAK in Vienna holds over 8,000. Ise-katagami.
  9. Ise-katagami, from Shiroko near Suzuka (Mie); documented since at least the 16th century; the carving art designated an Important Intangible Cultural Property (1993). Ise-katagami.
MÉTRICA · THE ARCHIVE · MAR DEL PLATA · PRINTED IN THE USA