Here is Mud in your Eye
Mudcloth as a way for young creators to make a living.
In the mid 1970s in Bamako, Mali, a group of art students became impatient with a heavily European academic curriculum that meticulously avoided just about anything African and Malian. They were longing for ways forward into art and creativity that embraced their own culture, ways that resonated with meanings that belonged to them. Six of these students banded together to form Groupe Kasobane. The name means ‘prison is finished, we are free’, a rallying cry for their exploration of Malian heritage. Mudcloth was their chosen medium.
As Boubacar Doumbia, one of Kasobane’s founders, says, ‘We were the pioneers who explored mudcloth as a means of expression in the form of contemporary art.’ While the group’s work embraced the earthy colours of mudcloth, it expanded the visual language from geometric symbols into scenes of nature and village life. In their hands, mudcloth became a form of painting.
Mudcloth in Bambara (one of the major languages of Mali) is bogolanfini - a joining of the words for ‘mud’, ‘made with’ and ‘cloth’. Mudcloth is, indeed, made with mud, but not just any mud. The process starts with dark, iron-rich silt dredged from the Niger River. Some say that March is the best time of year to send boatmen out to the middle of the river to gather buckets of fresh sediment carried from the highlands of neighboring Guinea into Mali by spring torrents. Others, perhaps less poetically, gather it from the muck at the bottom of ponds...
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Original article, written by Keith Recker.
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Further Information:
This article was first published in Selvedge Issue 88, Geometric.
Discover more about natural dyeing traditions from around the world in Keith Recker’s True Colors: World Masters of Natural Dyes and Pigments, published by Thrums Books.
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Image Credits:
Photos: Adriaan Louw, David Crookes (Courtesy of Design Network Africa and Trevyn McGowan)