Indigo, Starch and Thread: The Judith Appio Adire Collection
Adire is made by keeping dye out. Cassava starch painted onto cloth, thread drawn through in running stitch, fabric gathered and knotted. Each technique holds the indigo at bay in a precise location, and the pattern emerges from what the cloth refused to absorb. The Yoruba women who developed these methods across generations in south-western Nigeria were designing what to protect, not what to mark.
Three Yoruba adire eleso cloths, fourth quarter of the 20th century, Nigerian, each resist-dyed in indigio with patterns of circles.
The Judith Appio Collection, coming to the Sworders Fine Interiors auction on June 23 and 24 2026, is among the most technically complete bodies of Yoruba adire to appear on the open market. Assembled by the Nigerian designer and collector Judith Appio during the 1970s and 1980s, the fifteen lots cover all three distinct adire methods: adire eleko, where cassava or rice starch paste resists the dye; adire eleso, the tie-and-bind technique; and adire alabere, worked with needle and thread in a running stitch that gathers and compresses the cloth before dyeing. Two Nupe Bida or Hausa ceremonial robes are offered individually alongside the adire cloths.
Three Yoruba adire eleko indigo cloths, third quarter of the 20th century, Nigerian, each resist-dyed with various patterns.
Adire was women's work, transmitted within families and households, its symbolic patterns encoding aspects of Yoruba identity, status, and daily life. The specialised knowledge required for all three methods is no longer in common circulation, which makes early examples of this breadth correspondingly difficult to locate. Appio acquired her pieces directly from villages and communities across the region over many years, and the collection is noted in John Picton and Rayda Becker's The Art of African Textiles: Technology, Tradition, and Lurex (1995).
Two Yoruba adire eleso indigo cloths, fourth quarter of the 20th century, Nigerian, each resist-dyed.
The timing of this auction has its own context. The Tate Modern exhibition Nigerian Modernism: Art and Independence, which closed in May 2026, placed adire firmly within Nigeria's 20th-century art history rather than at its edges. Bruce Onobrakpeya incorporated adire fabrics into his monumental triptych The Last Supper (1981); Susanne Wenger used the cassava starch-resist method to depict the Yoruba creation story in Mythos Odùduwà Schöpfungsgeschichte (1963). Yusuf Grillo, one of the exhibition's central figures, traced his preoccupation with blue directly to the indigo of adire cloth. Nike Davies-Okundaye, taught the technique by her great-grandmother, went on to found the Nike Art Centre in Lagos in 1983, teaching it in turn to local women as a means of economic independence.
Three Yoruba adire eleko indigo cloths, third quarter of the 20th century, Nigerian, each resist-dyed with various patterns, to include one 'Eyepe'. The Eyepe pattern (meaing ‘all the birds are here’, or literally ‘birds are complete’) is a traditional Ibadan adire design. As well as various birds including chickens and pigeons, the pattern depicts crocodiles, chameleons, watches, drums, and scorpions.
The Appio collection arrives in a market newly alert to what these textiles represent — not as ethnographic curiosity, but as the material foundation of a sophisticated and continuous visual culture.
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Further Information:
The Judith Appio Collection is coming to the Sworders Fine Interiors auction on June 23 and 24 2026.
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Image Credits:
Lead: A Nupe Bida or Hausa men's agbada robe, second quarter of the 20th century, Nigerian, indigo-dyed and hand-woven 'etu' or 'saki' strip cloth, embroidered in white silkwith two knives (aska biyu) design. Provenance: The Judith Appio Textiles Collection.
All images courtesy of Sworders, and provenance of The Judith Appio Textiles Collection.