Kuzu-fu/Kudzu Cloth, kuzu weft, cotton warp, August 2023.

Kudzu is a fast growing vine that thrives in warm places across the world, including all around the place I call home. Where I'm from it's called kudzu, but in Japan where it grows natively, it's pronounced kuzu. Recently I was lucky enough to travel to Japan to take part in a workshop hosted by the Oigawa Kuzu-fu Weaving Studio. At this workshop I was trained by the skilled Murai family who have been working creatively with the vine for generations. I learned how to harvest the vines, process them into thread, and weave the processed fiber into cloth. I am very grateful to my teachers at the Oigawa Kuzu-fu Weaving Studio for passing this skill along, here's their website if you'd like to learn more about what they do: OigawaKuzuFu

It's important to keep the processed threads from getting twisted while you weave. When flat, the kudzu fibers create a wonderfully shimmery fabric that reflects light. To do this, it helps to be able to use a scooping motion when you beat your weft passes. I made this cloth sample using a 200 year old Japanese back strap loom, pronounced in Japanese as koshi-bata. A strap attached to your leg and a strap anchored around your lower back are used to raise and lower the shed between weft passes. To me this physical intertwinement with the workings of the loom felt like a special dance between tool and creature. Here's a short clip of me weaving the kuzu-fu on the koshi-bata.

Kudzu fascinates me beyond words. My mom has worked with it creatively since I was a child, and beyond all the metaphors of resiliency, migration, and growth, she is what comes to mind most when I see the sprawling kudzu vine. Normally I think kudzu comes off quite harsh. I feel like it radiates humidity, and the little hairs all over it make me feel itchy before I even touch it. But sitting in a mountain stream with fermented vines floating gently before me, small fish nibbling at the soft plant matter breaking away from the vine's inner fibers, the kudzu was nothing but soothing. I thought about my mothers hands, about the way the vines would make her car smell when she'd come back from a fresh harvest off the side of the road. I thought about the past. But I also thought about how grateful I was to be where I was at that current moment, not a little girl watching her mom but a young person on her own, in a country where she didn't speak the language, surrounded by kind, helpful strangers, working with plants and water and small fish. Our teacher made sure we all bowed and thanked the river before leaving. He was very passionate about the ways working with natural fibers demand we acknolwedge our interconnectedness with nature.