Israeli Designers, Textile Design yael harnik | repetition and exhaustion

yael harnik is living the dream. wait, i should rephrase. she is living my dream. for the past five years yael has being living in tokyo and has been doing the only logical thing for a young textile designer. she has been working on her japanese along with mastering the traditional japanese dyeing techniques and especially katazome, a stencil and dye resistant method. in her creations, yael is inspired by the natural world and explores the concepts of time and repetition, touching upon the liminal zone between east and west.
she just showed the world her “disclosure“, which is yael’s PhD research at the tama art university.
“my research aims to consolidates new formations of material apprehension and concepts of time and repetition, reflecting the idea of temporality embodied in the traditional japanese dyeing techniques of katazome and indigo, on one hand, and the hebrew biblical blue tekhelet, on the other.”
in her work, yael finds inspiration in the movement of water and she keeps coming back to it time and time again. she is searching and researching the connections between patterns and folds.
she has been looking at the movement of the water as an expression of something that repeats itself but at the same time changes all the time. yael’s take on the concept of water is also rooted in the technique behind the katazome. it’s a method in which stencils are used with dye resistant paste to create patterns on textile. the technique is based on natural materials such as rice paste as the resistant, seaweed, and soybeans. it’s a sisyphean hand-painting method that keeps you in the zone and forces you to pay attention to every move and gesture that you take.
while going through yael’s creations, i could notice that my mind drifted away. it almost felt like when i’m siting in front of the ocean (and as you know me, it happens a lot!) and staring at the waves that keep on creating a never ending game of patterns.
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https://www.yaelharnik.com/