|
Sometimes called "top-down" or "half-hitch" coiling, this technique is where my interests in looping, coiling and history merge. The stitching is like looping with an added core element. The shaping methods are like coiling. The results are contemporary -- an interpretation, not a replication, of a technique that honors a very old tradition.
Tierra del Fuego is an archipelago at the southernmost tip of South America. When Ferdinand Magellan sailed through the channel that joins the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in 1520, his crew saw big man-made fires on the southern shore, which is how the area became known as the land of fire. The Yámana people who inhabited the coastal areas of Tierra del Fuego used scarce material resources creatively to make tools for their main occupation - getting food. Harsh weather and poor soil are not great conditions for developing an agriculture tradition, and since the area has abundant marine resources the culture here was based on nomadic hunting, gathering and fishing.
A hunting and gathering subsistence economy requires 7 to 500 square miles of land per capita, depending on the resources in the local environment. People live in small groups, and move on before they exhaust the food resources of an area. Throughout 99 percent of the time that Homo sapiens has been on Earth, or until about 8,000 years ago, all peoples were foragers of wild food. Some specialized in hunting game, fishing, and shellfish gathering, while others were almost completely gatherers of wild plants. The hunting-gathering societies declined with the growth of agricultural societies, which either drove them from their territories or assimilated or converted them. Today, the remaining ones are confined to desert, mountain, jungle, or Arctic wastelands.
People like that are generally considered poor in material culture. They're selective about what they possess, but what they possess has real value to them. They make do with what they have, finding creative ways to use the resources available to them to meet their needs. That's their necessity, and also their tradition.
I think it's a good tradition to remember. I may be working Fuegian coiling with a core of willow I grew myself or with strips of luxurious fabrics -- getting very different results from the same technique because of my choice of materials. I'm grateful to have choices, but I try not to forget that the best resource I have is my imagination.
Fuegian Coiling Workshop Topics
|
|
