Tuesday, January 30, 2007

moose tufting

There’s an art form up here called “moose tufting” --a very 19th-century kind of craft, reminds me of a Paris exhibition I saw a few years ago that involved Victorian "hair" art, woven jewelry out of human hair. moose tufting is more elegant: you take tufts of moose fur, arrange it in clumps against fabric, cut the clumps down to form flower patterns, and dye the fur. curiously, tufting only developed after Europeans arrived in the North, though looking at it, tufting does look very floral-English rather than the more geometric designs in beading & other First Nations art up here.

1 comment:

always with the fullness of my heart, Maxi said...

moose hair is the new matthew barney...and that is the way of the world