Red Bamboo Forest

Motif

Bamboo in Changing Light

If you walk through the Arashiyama Bamboo Grove at different times of day, you may notice how dramatically the bamboo seems to change colour. In the morning, the stalks can appear bright green; in certain light, they take on cooler, almost blue tones. And when the sunlight filters through the dense canopy, the bamboo can seem to glow with a warm, golden light above your head.

What I love about this Japanese obi featuring a bamboo motif is that it isn’t a literal or realistic representation of a bamboo forest. Instead, the weaver has interpreted bamboo through colour, rhythm and pattern. Capturing not only what a bamboo grove looks like, but perhaps the sensations it evokes, and letting us free to interpret it with our own experience as we contemplate this fabric.

This is why the design might remind you of walking beneath the towering bamboo in Arashiyama in Kyoto, even though it could just as easily evoke another bamboo forest somewhere in Japan. With an estimated 170,000 hectares of bamboo growing across the country, bamboo is deeply woven into Japan’s landscapes and visual culture.

For me, this is what makes traditional Japanese textile design so fascinating: a motif doesn’t always have to reproduce a landscape exactly. Sometimes it captures a feeling, a memory, or a fleeting impression of being somewhere.