Anni Albers: ‘Work with material’

32 page MS book, written out in Chinese ink on Indian Hemp Cream paper with gouache paintings, red Zerkall endpapers, 300 gsm Somerset Toned White card, plain paper jacket. Completed August 2022

In this essay, written in 1937, Anni Albers is at pains to explore how the practical demands of craftwork can lead to a kind of spiritual regeneration through an engagement with the natural principles of harmony implicit in material. She argues that industrialization has estranged humanity from material, and that by returning to material in its original state, we can satisfy our practical needs as well as our spiritual ones. In the field of craft work, the discipline that material imposes on the maker paradoxically creates boundaries for free imagination. It is by leaving the safe ground of accepted convention and finding ourselves alone and independent that can lead to a sense of meaning. Early in the essay, she states, ‘We must find our way back to simplicity of conception in order to find ourselves. For only by simplicity can we experience meaning, and only by experiencing meaning can we become qualified for independent comprehension.’

The Indian Hemp Cream paper that I used for this piece had a definite sense of materiality, while I aimed for maximum simplicity through the almost imperceptible shifts in the weaving pattern of the paintings. And I like to think that in everything I make, there is an element of independence, an expression of my own distinct voice.