Diergaardt Weaves From ‘Mind to Hand’

It’s a remarkable thing, metaphorically weaving people into cloth. Selecting the colours, the symbols, patterns and yarns that may best embody a soul. In ‘Mind to Hand’, fibre artist Lynette Diergaardt captures her treasured in textiles.

Debuting a collection of three distinct miniature weaving techniques at StARt Art Gallery two years after her poignant ‘Remembrance Through Cloth’, Diergaardt exhibits her exploration of various weaving methods in her Adinkra, Recycled Weaving and Experimental Weaving series.

Working in green with hints of blues and yellows in ‘Wilma’ from the Adinkra series, Diergaardt takes time to choose the elements of the piece which best complement the subject’s personality while incorporating the Ghanaian symbols of earth and dignity.

“The colours are reminiscent of colours that are usually used to describe the earth, such as mossy greens found in trees and grass, shades of blues found in water and the sky and yellow for sunshine,” says Diergaardt who designed this series on a computerised Digital Dobby Loom.

“My aunt Wilma is a mother at heart, a woman who is kind and strong. In a way, she has been a mother to me since mine passed on so many years ago. She is always there to guide me with a loving hand. The symbol used to describe her is a direct reflection of her character; the Adinkra symbol of earth and dignity.”

Exploring the exhibition’s title in the Experimental collection, Diergaardt considers the link between the mind and the hand while working spontaneously through her artistic process rather than pre-planning.

“The Experimental Weaving collection forces the artist to weave only that which comes to mind in the moment, therefore allowing the mind to speak directly to the hand, telling it what to weave,” says Diergaardt.

“The mood generated from each weaving is partly influenced by what my mood is at the moment of weaving and partly by the choice of colours put on the loom.

The work tries to build on the feeling of well-being and therefore focus more on the therapeutic aspects of weaving, rather than the outcome of the final piece.”

Repurposing old and recycled materials which formerly cluttered her home in the Recycled collection, the master fibre artist, Fulbright scholar and University of Namibia lecturer asserts that these weavings are her “contribution to cleaning up our Namibian environment by not throwing materials away which contribute to landfills, but instead to turn what would normally be considered waste into something beautiful that can speak for the environment”.

A celebration of cherished relationships, an investigation and tender in the idea that nothing is useless or without a second life, ‘Mind to Hand’ speaks to Diergaardt’s sensitivity wrought in a medium whose status as an art form and potential to convey complex ideas is often underestimated.

“In the fine arts world, fibre or textiles are not considered an appropriate fine art medium to produce artwork with.

Traditional painters and sculptors are very rigid about what are suitable art mediums.

I’ve come across many opinions where advisors or professors have tried to steer me away from fibre practice, suggesting that painting or drawing would better convey the concepts that I communicate through fibre,” says Diergaardt, who adds that fibre or fabric is considered ‘women’s work’ and beneath men, despite many cultures training men to be master weavers.

“Textiles are a wonderful medium to use in art practice. They best describe concepts like human relationships, memory, growth, decay, death, etc. because the medium itself is an inherent part of human life.”

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