Choose from Jade, Wasabi, Coal or Cedar as your kimono’s front colour. The sun and tree are ubiquitous.
Pair your Dahlia Drive Tree Kimono with the matching colour of Dahlia Drive Lace Piano Pants or, if you choose a Coal base, the Dahlia Drive Dot Piano Pants. A complete outfit!
Why a tree? From the back of the kimono, the tree mimics our spine and lungs. The red sun or orange moon is a familiar landscape in our visual history, evoking numerous associations to the life force and the wholeness of one. I see the tree as enduring, patient and responsive; it uses what it is given and prospers or dies. Regardless of the timing of its fate, in all processes it feeds and is fed life through the air and soil. Nothing is lost.
In creating the painting for the tree kimono, I screened the tree onto one piece of paper in black (coal) dye and, when dry, screen printed a red (heart) dot amongst the trees. On another sheet of paper I paint, in large strokes with a singular colour dye, a loosely structured star. My vision, when painting this star, is Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.I then screen clear dots onto the painting in order for the colour to be resisted at those spots. The kimono structure is folded into the same shape as the Vitruvian Man and the tree/sun is pinned to the back while the star painting is pinned to the front.
Once heatset, the kimono unfolds into layers of images; echoes of the tree become shadows in the front, the sun peeks through a resisted dot to land at your heart, the folds devolve from origami into a labyrinth of shapes and shades.
A quick piece to dramatize a simple dress, give class to jeans, cover arms in the sun. Washable, dryable, packable, uncreasable. Made from discarded curtain sheer roll ends.
