Indigo Dyeing

The traditional technique of printing and dyeing textiles with indigo has been practised in Europe for over four hundred years and continues today. This method of embellishing cloth is done on natural fabrics such as cotton, linen and silk. Historically, the process of indigo dyeing began by extracting colour from a species of plant called woad (Isatis tinctoria),grown in Germany’s Thuringia region. It was in wide use throughout Europe until the medieval period, when various European East India companies began expanding their trade with Southeast Asia. From the seventeenth century onwards, Dutch merchants began to import indigo (Indigoferatinctoria) from India. It was preferred for its intensity of hue and hence gradually replaced the older method of extracting the dye from the woad plant. With the introduction of mechanization and bulk production in today’s market, syntheticallyproduced indigo (indanthren blue) is increasingly used in place of natural dyes. This shift has taken place in most parts of the world; although some craftspeople still prefer to create vibrant printed textiles using conventional dyes and the labour-intensive processes associated with them.

Today a handful of active workshops in Germany preserve the indigo craft, which is known locally as as Blaudruck (blue printing). One such establishment operates out of an old warehouse in Jever, a renowned traditional centre in Lower Saxony. Blaudruckerei Jever is headed by Georg Stark, one of Germany’s few remaining traditional indigo printers and dyers, and his successor Sabrina Schuhmacher. Their practice focuses on long-established East Frisian and North German indigo dyeing techniques. They use a method known as reserve printing on such materials as cotton, linen, hemp, velvet and silk. Blaudruckerei Jever’s wide repertoire of historical designs consists of around 1,100 printing blocks. Among these patterns are five hundred vintage designs ranging from the years 1660 to the 1920s. These include Asian motifs such as pomegranates and peacock feathers, Christian themes, numerous floral patterns, delicate floral pattern stripes, and designs from the Art Deco period.

For the project featured here, made/in collaborated with Matthias Mansen, a Berlin-based artist who works with woodcut, to develop a new printing block with abstract motifs. This is the first time that Stark and Schuhmacher worked with a printing block specially designed to demonstrate the precise, individual stages of the reserve print process. Blaudruckerei Jever mainly works with centuries-old, historical blocks, which Stark has collected assiduously over the past thirty years.

In the technique of reserve printing, practised predominantly in Europe, practitioners use hand-crafted wooden and metal blocks to apply the designs onto the fabric. Large pattern blocks are traditionally made of wood from the pear tree. For intricate designs, blocks are preferred that are set in fine metal pins or stripes. Printing blocks were conventionally made by mould makers, although this specialized craft is also slowly declining. With the onset of industrialization, mechanized roller printing came into wide use, replacing traditional craft practices. Today in Germany, only twelve Blaudruck workshops continue to print textiles through age-old craft processes. Indeed, the art form has become so rare that the European indigo dyeing process was officially included on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in 2018. This has brought greater visibility to the art form.

Photos by Astrid Grosser