Indigo: Beauty and Burden

Planned - January 2026

Indigo is more than a colour, it is a story written in blue. Across Nigeria and Japan, this deep dye has long been coaxed from plants into cloth, carrying with it memory, ritual, and identity.

In West Africa, Yoruba makers developed Adire Eleko, painting cassava resist onto cloth before dipping it into indigo vats. Each motif stars, waves, or proverbs spoke of lineage, spirit, and community. In Japan, artisans cultivated Aizome, fermenting the indigo plant into living dye vats. Through folding, binding, and dipping, Shibori cloths emerged with patterns that glow like light through water.

Indigo is also tied to harder histories. Its trade was bound up with colonialism and slavery, woven into the economics of exploitation. To acknowledge indigo honestly is to face both the harm and the resilience it carries.

We don’t avoid those truths we hold them alongside the beauty. Indigo shows us that craft and culture can be both wound and remedy, past and possibility. A colour that has travelled oceans yet remains rooted in soil, story, and survival.