״Imagine a mound of stones," write the exhibition curators, Galit Gaon and Tom Cohen. "A familiar local landscape that hints at lives once lived and now gone.
Beneath our feet, layers of earth both conceal and reveal traces of those who came before us. From their lives, only a few remnants remain: stones, coins, tools. The first thing to disappear is life itself, and its stories. Then, one by one, the soft layers closest to us vanish—those that protect the body—the layers of textile.
Textile objects are the result of complex, collaborative processes. In the ancient world, as in the contemporary one, many different hands are needed to grow, harvest, process, dye, spin, knit, weave, sew, and decorate even the simplest item. Such objects have often represented the pinnacle of skill and the wealth of a place and culture. This is a social language in which we all instinctively read messages about status, identity, mythology, nationality, technology, and economy.
The exhibition is a dialogue between makers working with contemporary crafts and technologies, and those who practiced these crafts in the distant past, as well as those who will engage with them in the near and distant future—a movement in the present that gropes both forward and backward in time.
Together, we sought to leave traces in the ongoing conversation between the ancient and the yet to come a single layer in the accumulating mound of craft."
The Sample scroll was made in resemblance to one of the oldest methods of preservation for textile crafts - the sampler book. students of textile arts and fashion would make a hand made kind of index book of the crafts they have learnt. In these sampler books were kept sewing samplers of types of pockets, pleats, embroidery, mending etc. every sample categorized with its name, and notes on how to use each technique. tailoring students would make special miniature versions of clothes, made meticulously using the same exact techniques used when working in human scale, folded delicately and pinned to the pages of the book. Till this day many archives and museums hold hundreds of sampler books as a rare example of textile arts, the techniques used working in those fields during past centuries and their development through the years. Parisian Couture houses also used to make sampler books of their work in order to archive the development of complicated cutting techniques, fabrics, embroidery etc but without wasting large amounts of expensive materials. The most known Sampler book archived was owned by Marie Antoinette, famously called “Gazette des Atours” ( gazette of attire), with samples from her full closet.
Transferring the format to the times in question Kushnir created a Scroll sampler. This work displayes miniature examples of clothing made based on the findings and academic research of the archaeology of clothing. accompanying the clothing are samples of different crafts like weaving, basketry, sewing and embroidery types that have been used in Cnann for adornment of clothing or coverings. The types of fibers used are wool, flax and cotton partly hand dyed using wine, mud and flowers. hiding amongst the seemingly historical pieces is one shirt taken from Kushnirs collection, chosen for its cut. This shirt is made in the same method all of the first garments in the world were made; from straight forms and no rounded edges, piecing together only squares, rectangles and triangles.
