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Tapestry Mistery

Tapestry Mistery

STUDIO NOTES FROM "DESTROY & REBUILD"

Author: Erasmo A. Ciufo

I have always been drawn to the meaning of symbols, to the way shapes carry ideas long before they carry style. Before ornament became decoration, it was belief made visible.

In the medieval world, patterns were not drawn to please the eye, but to discipline it. Geometry was a spiritual tool: repetition, symmetry, and rhythm were ways to suggest order, eternity, and transcendence. In churches and cathedrals, surfaces were designed to guide the gaze upward and inward, turning walls, floors, and tapestries into instruments of contemplation.

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This is why medieval ornament was never arbitrary. What we now read as decorative geometry was once a shared visual language, deeply tied to religion and collective life. Patterns carried meaning. They translated the invisible into something measurable, repeatable, and communal. Faith, structure, and design were inseparable.

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In European Gothic architecture, beginning with the great construction sites of the twelfth century promoted by figures such as Abbot Suger , ornament became part of the structure itself. Rosettes, interlaces, and geometric frameworks were not added afterwards, but conceived alongside space and light. This language travelled across centuries and territories, reappearing in Lombard tapestries and textiles, particularly in the Milanese area, where pattern became a form of collective memory woven into everyday life.

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Over time, these geometries left sacred spaces and entered daily use. They were copied, worn, repaired, simplified. By the end of the nineteenth century, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, this visual heritage was dissected and studied as a design grammar. Manuals such as Cusack’s Freehand Ornament by Charles Armstrong , published in London in 1895, did not invent new forms. They analysed existing ones: straight lines, curves, symmetries, repetitions. A clear demonstration that medieval ornament was not folklore, but design. Method. Construction.

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This is where the work really started for me.

As I was working on these patterns, I kept coming back to the idea of reuse and symbolic clash, and to denim as the place where this could happen. Denim carries a strong symbolic weight. It is durable, functional, worn close to the body. Over time, it has become a kind of contemporary armour. It absorbs use, repairs, stains, and gestures. Allowing different histories to collide on a fabric meant to endure felt like the most honest way to bring these references into the present.

Historical motifs are not reproduced in a philological way. They are treated as found materials. Fragmented, eroded, torn apart and reassembled. As if they had passed through many hands, worn down by time, repaired out of necessity rather than aesthetics. The pattern loses its original perfection and becomes a lived surface.

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In the jacquard denim, the graphic is not applied but structural. The fabric itself becomes a contemporary tapestry. Patterns interrupt each other, overlap, misalign. They resemble patches sewn together over time, like garments repeatedly repaired rather than preserved.

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Within this system enters the bandana. A symbol of street culture, travel, and everyday use. The paisley motif is reinterpreted not as a modern code, but as an ancient one. As if it could have emerged from the same symbolic need that once shaped religious ornament, and reached the present through layers of migration, ritual, and reuse.

The two denim sets and the two bandanas share the same tension: past and present not as quotation, but as continuity. Pattern becomes memory. Not something to observe from a distance, but a trace to be worn.

This is not nostalgia. It is an attempt to return ornament to its original meaning: a constructed, symbolic, human language. Imperfect. Alive.

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Bibliography
  1. https://archive.org/details/briggs1885brig
  2. https://archive.org/details/briggs00brig

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Medioeval Heraldry
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