RITUAL PROCESS

Unsung Weavers is a call for the renewal of ceremonial textile production. Our collected fabrics date from a time when every household created its own clothing and each village contained multiple craftspeople. Traditional rural production was dependent on life’s rhythmic cycles, requiring both rainwater and dry periods, in tune with the seasons and nature’s ancient wisdom. Once woven, blankets were felted in riverbeds after the rains came. Through ritualistic processes wool’s innate properties became animated by earthly divinities, alongside water and light, before being reanimated by the maker’s hands. Unsung Weavers re-frames these traditions of material metamorphosis for the present day, with our work serving as a living tribute to the timeless collaboration between nature’s human and non-human agents.

LOCAL WOOL

The collected vintage fabrics we work with act as a live link with the real and imagined roots we all have with the past. Usually coming from monasteries or old dowry chests, they were reproduced in collaboration with a family farm in the Epirus region: the farmers gather surplus wool from their animals for us, before weaving it on an electronic loom and felting it traditionally in the natural water beds of Epirus. The initial raw, thick, dense cloth has since been transformed ensuring its continuity into the future.

WEAVING AND FELTING

The process of weaving and felting was a community effort: shearing the animals, spinning thread, hand-weaving. The weaving was done in narrow looms no wider than 130 cm, which meant the weaver would need to then stitch together two, three or four separate segments to create a length of material to work with. To generate the thick, dense, waterproof quality of felted wool, the length of fabric would be washed in the river and stone pools, soaked for lengthy periods, then beaten during the rains to produce its final structure and left to freely expand.

HAND-DYE

After scouring the hills of Attica sourcing coloured flowers and searching for roots, the dyeing is done by hand in our Athenian studio. Once gathered, the piles of herbs first need crushing and fermenting to draw out their tones. Everything is weighted. Depending on the thread's consistency, fabrics are dyed in multiple stages to ensure best results. Bark dust billows in the air, slow boiling turns the mixture to molten bronze, and dark water-swirls over the wool. The fabrics then dry in the sunlight, lying out under the open skies.

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