Content

The past two days were spent writing paragraphs of body copy. The following text falls under the category of a conceptual basis, a first layer of information, upon which I have to build with the use of image/typography/form and, most importantly, quotations and secondary information from conversations and direct analysis.

Taste

Culturally imbibed notions that underly and govern our aesthetic decisions. Our ability to distinguish and judge aspects of the external world as beautiful, good or proper, is a universal and profoundly human trait.

“[Taste] functions as a sort of social orientation, a ‘sense of one’s place,’ guiding the occupants of a given social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position.”-Pierre Bourdieu


Cloth Body

In the Western tradition of categorizing garments as fitted, structured or draped, cloth is mere yardage until it comes alive when worn. A Sari, by contrast, is a living entity, with an identity of its own. It is an abstract, structured cloth body, validated by form and technique, prescribed by principles of a lasting tradition.

The apparent simplicity of form in the long standing tradition of unstitched garments- essentially long, embellished rectangles of cloth- belie their endless adaptibility for aesthetic and functional purposes. Indeed, The sari symbolises design thinking of an unprecedented level of sophistication.

Stitched garments are cut and tailored to conform to the human body. Weaving a Sari, by contrast, implies an understanding of form and perception of an inner and outer surface, a front and back, a top and bottom, with a crucially determinate relationship, before conception. Structure emerges through the instrumental act of weaving. The sari is a flowing, corporeal entity. The correlations between the various parts of the sari corresponds towards an abstract self, or body.

The borders, referred to as Karai, or river bank, establish laterality and fall closely to the hands and feet when worn. The pallu, or thalappu, is the distinctive, ornate, face of this abstract body.
The middle segment of the sari is consistent with the torso of this abstract being. It is joined to the limbs, yet opposed and differentiated.The surface texture, or Raham, has a density and coherence.

Korvai- Unity and Opposition

Since ancient times, beauty has always been associated with proportion.The Kanchipuram silk sari is located in the sphere of the auspicious by it’s very essence and design concept. The etymology of the descriptive term Korvai implies a unity of opposing elements.

This is mirrored in the meaning of the term rasi, or auspiciousness, which also implies a joining of opposed forces

Each surface exists in relation to another. This technique highlights the distinctiveness of the border from he main body of the Sari, usingg color differentiation. Saris may be woven in three or two colors, with a distinctive solid coloured border.

Praxis

Praxis refers to a unity between the intrumental and rational, and the symbolic or expressive.

Making Special.

Elaboration implies an aesthetic adjustment to a functional object in order to fulfill a deeper, more profound human need. Ethologist Ellen Dissanayake calls this the process of “making special.” Dissanayake believes that the aesthetic impulse is transcultural and derives from a basic human need for intimacy, originating in the mother-child complex.

"Embellishment, like adaptation, is an act of claiming agency that marks the agent as both an individual and part of a community."

She argues that the process of evolution led us to value and find attractive visual signs of health, youth and vitality- smoothness, glossiness, warm colors, cleanliness; Precision, agility, endurance and grace of movement also came to be prized, as did vividness, rhythmicity, resonance and power. In speech, repetition, verse and key words, antiphony, alliteration, assonance and rhyme. Within the larger sphere of man's control over the unruly wild, we came to appreciate pattern, contrast, balance, roundness, length, geometric shapes, and even more complex forms and asymmetry. She argues that art, although it originates from our mundane everyday experiences, is crafted to provie a more intense view of life.

The Malady of the Quotidian

Mundane, repetitive actions can, when performed over a significant period of time, have a soothing and calming effect. It can provide the performer a chance to contemplate and access areas of the mind that one does not easily venture into in our chaotic modern lives, chasing novel experiences. Nature itself is cyclical and repetitive, and human work has evolved to be a part of it.