Yoruba Adire Cloth

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Yoruba Adire Cloth

• Africa Art- adire eleko cloth
• 3rd grade

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Southwestern Nigeria

• The Yoruba people live on the west coast of
  Africa in Nigeria and can also be found in the
  eastern Republic of Benin and Togo. There are
  also many Yoruba currently living in Europe,
  particularly Britain, since Nigeria was once a
  British colony. The Yoruba are one of the largest
  cultural groups in Africa. Currently, there are
  about 40 million Yoruba world-wide. The Yoruba
  have been living in advanced urban kingdoms for
  more than 1,500 years. They created a strong
  economy through farming, trading, and art
  production. Their outstanding and unique artistic
  traditions include woodcarving, sculpture, metal
  work, textiles, and beadwork.

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• West Africans, such as the Yoruba, have lived in
  urban societies and have produced extraordinary
  art work since the 5th century BC. During this
  time, the Yoruba began to use iron to create
  metal tools and weapons such as machetes, axes,
  and hoes. These tools made it easier for the
  Yoruba to farm the land. They planted crops
  including yams, their staple food. They also
  harvested the seeds from the palm oil tree. The
  seeds from this tree produce a vegetable oil that
  is used for cooking. Kola nuts were also grown
  and harvested. Soon the Yoruba began trading with
  neighboring areas for rice and sorghum. Due to
  increased agriculture, the Yoruba community began
  to grow in size and large towns were created.
  They arranged their communities by clan lines, or
  extended families.

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Art Work
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African Adire Cloth

• Textiles not only played an important role in the
  arts of Africa but in the basic lives of Africans
  as well. Textiles were mostly used as clothing,
  hanging freely on the body or fitted like clothes
  of present day Americans. African clothing could
  be expressed as the social status of the African
  wearing the clothes.
• One type of textile that is used in African
  culture is the African adire cloth. Adire is the
  Yoruba word for indigo resist-dyed cloth.
• The dye used in the adire process is indigo
  which came from India around the beginning of the
  seventeenth century
• There were two types of adire cloth, adire oniko
  and adire eleko. Adire oniko used tie dying to
  create resist patterns, while adire eleko used
  starch resists to create patterns.
• Adire oniko could use resist dyeing many
  different ways. Most of the time, two or more
  layers of cloth were used. The cloth could be
  folded into pleats (the cloth was eventually tied
  together to form one bundle), repeatedly tied in
  knots, tied with raphia, stitched, or sometimes
  sticks and stones could be fastened in or on the
  cloth

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Adire Eleko

• The second form of adire was adire eleko. There
  were two forms of adire eleko, stenciling with
  starch and painting with starch. The starch used
  in both stenciling and painting was created from
  cassava flour or yam flour, which was stirred in
  with boiling water to make the product smoother.
• The designs for stenciling on adire eleko were
  created by marking the patterns on flat roofing
  sheet. The patterns were cut out of the metal and
  starch was painted onto the cloth over the
  stencil.
• Stenciling was considered mans work, as opposed
  to painting the adire eleko cloth, which was
  considered womens work. In the painting process,
  the starch was painted on the cloth and when
  dyed, the indigo resisted where the starch was
  painted on. The African women used chicken
  feathers, thin pieces of palm leaves and
  matchsticks, all as different methods of painting
  patterns on the cloth. Both the stenciling
  products and the painting products were dyed with
  indigo, and their final images are quite similar
  to the adire oniko cloth, the only difference was
  the meticulous processes that are involved in
  creating the beautiful textiles.

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• All forms of adire cloth were divided into
  individual shapes, usually rectangles, with
  patterns and designs within each one. The
  fascinating part of adire patterns was that each
  different design has its own symbolic meaning or
  story.

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Senufo people and mud cloths

• Fakaha is a small village in the country of Côte
  d'Ivoire, West Africa. The Senufo people create
  paintings that are stylized drawings of masked
  figures and animals. Painted by the men, who live
  in Fakaha, the paintings are drawn and painted on
  pieces of white, loosely woven, cotton fabric.
  First, the Senufo draw the figures freehand with
  a yellowish-green dye made from the leaves of the
  falma bush. Then a second coat of black paint is
  drawn on top of the falma dye. This paint is made
  from a sludgy mud dug from the roots of trees in
  swampy areas. Traditional Senufo paintings were
  made into dance or hunting clothes. The Senufo
  believe the drawings have special powers that
  protect and bring the hunter good luck. Today
  this cloth is seldom made into hunting clothes.
  Instead, the paintings are sold to tourists and
  specialty shops. Many have become ornamental
  fabrics for wall hangings, pillows, tablecloths,
  or other decorative items.

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Stylized animals and people
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The Project
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Step by step

• 1st- Draw a sketch of your animal that you will
  use on scrap paper.
• 2nd - Use the Adrinka symbols and draw in white
  oil pastel on light blue paper. Create patterns
  with the symbols
• 3rd Paint over top with blue biggie cakes
  (this is a wax resist). Similar to the processing
  of dying the cloth.
• 4th - Draw a stylized animal on black, brown, or
  dark gray paper. It must be very large
• 5th - Create more patterns on the animal with a
  variety of colored construction paper.
• 6th Glue down on paper

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Vocabulary words

• Line- A mark with length and direction(-s). An
  element of art which refers to the continuous
  mark made on some surface by a moving point.
  Types of line include vertical, horizontal,
  diagonal, straight or ruled, curved, bent,
  angular, thin, thick or wide, interrupted
  (dotted, dashed, broken, etc.).
• Pattern- The repetition of any thing shapes,
  lines, or colors
• Crayon Resist- A substance which protects a
  surface from receiving paints, inks, or dyes.
  Waxes are commonly used as a resist to the dyes
  used in batik.
• Adire Eleko- indigo resist-dyed cloth created by
  the woman of Yoruba, from the southwest coast of
  Nigeria
• Senufo- People from the small village of Fakaha
  in the country of Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa who
  created mud paintings.
• Contrast- A large difference between two things
• stylized- To stylize is to alter natural shapes,
  forms, colors, or textures in order to make a
  representation in a preset style or manner. The
  design of any work tends to result in its having
  a style, and its having been freely chosen is one
  aspect of its appeal.