Filip Kubák rolled a pinch of freshly processed Czech hemp between his fingers and judged the fibres too short to spin. He gave the verdict to a field of art students who had been hoping for a different answer. Kubák runs a family weaving mill in Strmilov and had come to Farma Lapka to inspect the harvest. The students had spent the morning handpicking stems nearly three metres tall, and they took the bad news back to Prague.
Anna Šípová: THE HEMP BAG / THE LINEN BAG. Bags made from hemp and linen. SOW HEMP!, UMPRUM. Photo: Emma Lea Nikodýmová.
That setback became SOW HEMP!, the result of two semesters of work at the Studio of Textile at UMPRUM, the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, led by Linda Kaplanová and Martin Pondělíček. The hemp was grown and processed by Farma Lapka, a farm in the Rakovník region of the Czech Republic. Its fibre turned out to be too short and to contain too much shive, the woody part of the plant, for standard textile production. So the studio asked a different question: what can be made from the hemp that is available locally today? Students worked the fibre by hand, and the coarseness and stiffness a commercial spinner would reject ended up shaping the finished pieces.
Tereza Hlaváčková: JOY. An armchair using hemp fibre and tufting. SOW HEMP!, UMPRUM. Photo: Maria Michopulu.
Sheep’s wool turned out to be the ally hemp needed. Kubák’s mill tested blends with Czech fleece until a ratio of 70 percent wool to 30 percent hemp produced a yarn that held together, chunky and characterful, with obvious promise for interiors. The ten works shown at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven include tapestries, carpets, acoustic elements and bioplastics. Among them are Tereza Hlaváčková’s tufted armchair and Natálie Malá’s suspended tapestry, which reveals the unseen labour of the weaver. Hemp paper also took on organic forms for a stop-motion film.
Anna Čekalová: HEALING TOUCH OF TEXTURES. A textile project using natural materials to explore touch and texture. SOW HEMP!, UMPRUM. Photo: Natalie Kubenková.
Why did such a useful plant vanish from European cloth? Hemp supplied sailcloth and rope for thousands of years (the word canvas shares a root with cannabis), yet cotton, synthetics and a stubborn stigma pushed it out. The 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs allowed cultivation for technical purposes and also strengthened the plant’s bad reputation, and Czechoslovakia stopped growing it altogether. Today the country has only two hemp processing facilities, Farma Lapka and Mabeko, which opened this year, so many growers export raw material and miss out on making anything from it.
Daniel Farkaš: I HOLD THE FORM, BUT NOT THE MEANING. A three-dimensional, vase-shaped object created using embroidery with hemp fragments. SOW HEMP!, UMPRUM. Photo: Klára Dostálová.
The students found a companion in Ursula K. Le Guin, whose Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction suggests that humanity’s first story might belong to whoever gathered seeds and carried them home to share. A hemp and wool yarn spun on a family loom works rather like that bag, holding a farm, a mill and a studio of students together. The yarn is spun and the mill is willing. Missing is the machinery to prepare more fibre, and more people ready to ask what a short, stubborn strand might become.
. . .
Further Information:
UMPRUM Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.
. . .
Image Credits:
Lead: Ferdinand Placák: HYAKINTHOS. A relief made from a hemp composite. SOW HEMP!, UMPRUM. Photo: Emma Lea Nikodýmová.
All further images as credited in captions.