Navigating Through
From Vietnam to Wisconsin - embracing impermanence through Shibori stitch and Indigo dye
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where an inspiration comes from except maybe just accepting it as ‘a knowing’. Through the years, through various bursts of motivation, I’ve found great joy when something inspires me to incorporate multiple means of expression — here embroidery and natural dye. Early 2023 I had started to plan a trip to Sapa, Vietnam where I had become familiar with a family from Cát Cát Village. When asking around for connections through people I knew, a handful of friends directly or indirectly suggested me to spend time with Nủ & Nhái, who host a simple, live-at-home homestay with their family in the mountain side of Sapa. It felt serendipitous.
Their businesses : Nờtu Sapa & Nhặt lá, đá ống bơ
There is something awing about spending time in the countryside of Vietnam. There’s this undeniable feeling of polarity to all the standards meant to up-hold in the US, leaning to this glimpse of life where everything feels different and authentic. A snapshot into a past I could never fully comprehend; a connection to ancestry I’ll never really know. The Hmong people live really closely with the land, celebrating the rice harvest each year and working with the Earth each day. This feeling of being immersed felt deeply inspiring to me.
I am endlessly grateful for the casualness to spend a week at Nờtu — to get a mere glimpse of life with this family, learning a little about what it means to live alongside a traditional life and a practice such as Indigo.
The month after returning to my home in Da Nang, Vietnam, I felt flushed with inspiration to create a piece that had been quietly stirring inside me. Inspired by rivers — and their endless ways of moving forward — I wanted to embroider a piece that carried inspiration from the power of both trusting impermanence & embracing a calmness in the transient nature of all things.
When it came to putting this piece together, it honestly had way to feel more like a movement — from the internal transcribed to the external. Through each individual stitch, I was connecting to an awareness of being present and watching things go — to just simply be. This was an act of acceptance and connection to the clarity always rested beyond any inner disturbance. Creating this piece felt empowering.
Working on this piece has been a compound of many parts of myself — extending to spend time & speak Vietnamese with a local Hmong family who tends to the growing and cultivation of Indigo, to a practice of presence to slow down and focus on each individual stitch through the Shibori embroidery process. All in all, it reflects a general softness and endearment for growing deeper with a craft thats become a means of expression and understanding.
I’m not sure if this post can fully capture all the aspects of myself that came together to create this piece, but I am grateful to have found the words to share it. I hope that in reading this, you can sense the sincerity behind this way of life inside me and perhaps find the softness of inspiration (a knowing) to create something unique of your own. 𖠰
Kristine Inga has taken a gentle journey exploring different means of slow-process art - finding inspiration from the natural world and incorporating those essences into art. This journey’s primary focus has been natural dye and embroidery, but also often poetry and watercolor.