のれんについて
What's "Noren"?
ー住まい手の思いを布に描くー
勝山の「のれん」は、住まい手と職人の協働から生まれた町のアート。
一枚一枚に、メッセージやストーリーが込められていて、住まい手がそれぞれ自己主張しているんです。そんな各家々の思いをできるだけ忠実に受け止めて、布に表現していくのが私の仕事。作家というより職人に徹して、一点一点オーダーメイドでデザインをおこし、しぼりなどの手法を用い染色しています。顔の見える関係だから、いっぱいわがままを言ってもらえるのが強み。「うちの“のれん”が一番よ」と誇らしげに揺れる「のれん」から、住まい手の感性や暮らしぶりをぜひ感じとってほしいですね。
加納容子(染織家)
What's "Noren"?
Noren are traditional cloth dividers that hang in doorways. They appear in the front entrance to bath houses and shops to signify that the establishment is open for business. Noren usually have one or more vertical slits in the cloth that run almost to the top. The designs on the historic noren of Katsuyama are made entirely through stitch resist and immersion dyeing. Noren are a uniquely Japanese expression in cloth.
- Putting Personality into Cloth -
The noren in Katsuyama are a collaboration between the local residents and artists. Each individually crafted noren contains a personal meaning for the people who work in the shop it decorates. My work is to express their personalities as faithfully as I can in the cloth. It's great to have a relationship with people I see every day where they can tell me exactly what they expect to see in their noren. I hope that visitors will get a sense of who the people in each shop are by looking at the noren over the door and that each resident can proudly say, “Mine is the best."
Yoko Kano(dyer and weaver)