yukata panel, unknown maker from Japan

Exhibition Label:
“Flowers, Dragons and Pine Trees: Asian Textiles in the Spencer Museum of Art,” Nov-2005, Mary Dusenbury
The flowering gourds on this fragment of a woman’s yukata (summer unlined kimono) were stenciled to resemble a shibori tie-dyed textile. Katazome stencil carvers were capable of producing imitations of shibori textiles so exact that only a trained eye could tell the difference. Stenciling a pattern was generally less expensive and time consuming to produce than stitching or tying it. Here, however, the attempt was not to deceive but rather to play with the idea of rendering a pattern typical of one technique in another.