Dyeing begins with water and returns to water.

I have worked with dyeing for many years, but when I look again at each part of the process, I realize that water is present in almost all of it.

When extracting dyes from plants, the color moves into the water. That water is taken up by a brush and carried to the fabric. Water carries the color, leaves it behind, and moves on. This seems to me to be something fundamental to dyeing.

When working with Hikizome, I am not looking only at color.

Through capillary action, water moves toward dry areas. It seeks its own level, and its molecules hold together through surface tension. I move the brush with an awareness of these properties of water, using their effects as part of the dyeing process.

During steaming, steam gently carries heat throughout the fabric.

And finally, there is mizumoto.

In Hanno, I wash the dyed fabric in the flowing river.

The continuous current, buoyancy, and the complex movement of water flowing in many directions. I enter this movement of water, far greater than myself, together with the fabric.

And I let the fabric rest in the current.

At that moment, I have a strange feeling that the scale has been reversed.

It feels as though I have entered the small world of color that I had been observing on the fabric. Standing in the water as if I myself were a tiny particle of color, I feel the river moving against my body, and through it I can sense the presence of the water whose properties I have been working with all along.

Water carries the color, leaves it behind, and moves on.

Now I am inside that same movement.

I meet again, in the river, the water that has been present throughout the entire process of dyeing.

Dyeing begins with water and returns to water.