CR05 — Addis Loom House
Version 2.0.0

An imagined highland loom house on a rain-cooled hillside: cotton white as paper with brightly bordered edges, the knock and shuttle of many looms, eucalyptus poles, and a courtyard where cloth hangs like banners between showers.

SEMANTIC SEED

Create work that is capable, tactile, alluring, and distinctly itself. Use this semantic seed as an aesthetic starting point. Interpret it through your medium, letting its character guide the discoveries you make as the work develops. Keep the place adult and dramatic: skill is its register, and charge is its constant.

Imagine a loom house in a highland capital, its courtyard ringed by shed-like rooms where looms click and knock all day. Let the cotton be white and fine, shedding lint into the light, the borders woven in colour so bright that they seem to be spoken rather than seen. Give the work the sound of rain on corrugated roofs mixed with the rhythm of shuttles, the smell of damp earth and raw thread, and the steady dignity of work done sitting very straight. Eucalyptus poles, mud-plastered walls and long wooden benches should show their handling. Let cloth be the architecture: lengths hung to dry, folded, lifted, draped over a shoulder to test the fall. Adult charge lies in the way weavers and customers judge fabric against bodies, in the choreography of fitting a wrap to a shoulder, and in a courtyard where everyone watches everything.

SEMANTIC TAGS

highland loom house; shuttle rhythm; white cotton and bright borders; rain on tin; courtyard of hung cloth; fabric judged on bodies

ARRIVAL AND CHARGE

A woman in a gown cut from one great length of the house's finest cloth, arriving to collect it before a wedding, turns the courtyard into a runway under bright wet sky. Weddings drive the trade and exacting clients are a respected genre, so her presence is a verdict the looms are proud to await.
