A Very Boro Colorful Cloth: Many Patches Many Holes

ca. early to mid twentieth century
56" x 25", 142.25 cm x 63.5 cm

This boro cloth lives up to its name: it is very ragged, and very beautiful, and it is destined to belong to someone who can appreciate its raggedy-ness, its many and prominent holes and its rather easy-to-see stains, all of which are pictured on the accompany photos-- and which we invite you to view carefully before considering to take this home.

But it is everything else about this piece which is so exciting: its colors, its small pieces of cloth which are all hand stitched together--and the variety of types of cloth, commercial and hand woven, which have been crammed into this luxuriously messy and wonderful colored boro length.

The cotton fragments are arranged in such a way as to appear tessellated, like an old, broken tile roof.  And look deeply into the construction and the cottons: there are a great many of cottons and they are all interesting in and of themselves.

Not for everyone, this fragile cloth kaleidoscope from old Japan is a marvelous thing to behold.