Woven Wonders

“Let the earth bless the Lord, praise and exalt him above all forever…. Everything growing on earth, bless the Lord…. All you beasts, wild and tame, bless the Lord…. All you mortals, bless the Lord.”

—Daniel 3:74

How do plants, beasts, and mortals praise and exalt the Lord above all forever? I’ve been working in textiles for over thirteen years, both as a print designer for women’s clothing brands and as a contemporary fiber artist. It is here, in textile design and cloth making, that I’ve come to see more clearly how the world actually can praise and exalt the Lord.

The realization began, though, with my children. While mine is an incredibly niche line of work, its flexibility and portability have, gratefully, made it possible for me to continue working while mothering four young sons. Our boys are huge fans of animals. Trips to the zoo and aquarium, and everyday moments in our own backyard, are filled with their voices telling me little-known facts about the creatures we see. Our bookshelves are lined with books such as Ultimate Reptileopedia, DK’s The Natural History Book, and Audubon Society field guides to frogs, birds, and the like. When our eldest was only four years old, we began watching Our Planet, a nature documentary series narrated by the incomparable David Attenborough. I credit Our Planet and the multitude of subsequent nature documentaries for the ignition of my boys’ deep-seated spirit of wonder and awe at the natural world.

The Life, photograph by Holly Guertin. Used by permission.

This exposure to the intricacies, peculiarities, and aesthetic wonders of our dazzling world opened my textile-trained eyes to see the artistry of our Creator God. Every surface throughout the world features a design, most often with repeated elements. I began to wonder, are there any solid colors found in nature? To this day, I have not found one. Think of a birch tree’s bark, the stripes of a lionfish, or the speckles on the skin of a watermelon. Our fingerprints and irises also contain repeated elements in lines and colors. Even obsidian and jet, the blackest stones on earth, have striations and curves throughout their surfaces. The closer we look at an object or surface, the more its repeated elements come to light.

At first look, a San Francisco garter snake has a resplendent teal, red, and black striped design on its back, but closer investigation reveals the design is made up of many scales that nestle within each other with each slinky movement. Look even closer and you’ll see a crest through the centerline of each scale, creating lights and shadows and deepening its visual effect. At a microscopic level, the snakeskin only becomes more magnificent with repeated elements in its cellular makeup.

As a print designer, I create repeat pattern designs by hand with paint, lino blocks, markers, pastels, you name it, before I digitize them for printing onto fabric with screens or digital printing. Designs are always “in repeat,” meaning they seamlessly repeat themselves throughout the fabric so that garments may be cut and sewn from any point. Before beginning my studies in fibers at the Savannah College of Art and Design, I rarely considered the role of the designer behind the fabrics I saw in shops.

When I started noticing the marvelous designs in animals and plants through nature documentaries and trips to the zoo and aquarium with my sons, I realized something huge: the Lord himself is a surface designer. From the polyps in the coral reefs to the biofluorescent plumes of the Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise, all the way down to plankton and mitochondria, the evidence of repeat patterns is interwoven throughout the world.

The Life (detail), photograph by Holly Guertin. Used by permission.

Noticing the Ultimate Designer through this lens deepened my grasp of Paul’s meaning when he writes, “Ever since the creation of the world, his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made” (Rom. 1:20). A working definition of art is the action of bringing the invisible to the visible. In my investigation of creation’s surface designs, I saw the true artistry and genius of God as the good creator.

In rereading the Pentateuch as a textile designer, I’ve been struck by the number of references to textiles throughout Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers. I had heard that sheep are cited more than four hundred times in the Bible, often in reference to their wool, but I had not noticed the references to textiles in the creation of the Ark of the Covenant, the ephod, and elsewhere throughout the text.

Of the Ark of the Covenant, with its rings, poles, cherubim, gold, and acacia wood, the Lord says, “There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the Ark of the Covenant, I will deliver to you all my commands for the Israelites” (Exod. 25:22). The Ark of the Covenant was to be the place where the Lord’s presence would be known, his word would be spoken, and the Israelites would find joy and sustenance.

It should be no wonder, then, that the Lord, the fashioner of all those surface designs throughout the natural world, prescribed that the builders and crafters of the Ark of the Covenant cover it with ornate and marvelous designs. Repeat pattern design is all through the Ark of the Covenant, from the lampstand’s golden “almond blossoms, each with calyx and petals” (Exod. 25:33–36) to the “tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twisted linen, and blue, purple, and crimson yarns … with cherubim skillfully worked into them” (Exod. 26:1); likewise the “curtain of blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and of fine twisted linen … made with cherubim skillfully worked into it” (Exodus 26:31); and “the screen for the entrance of the tent, of blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and of fine twisted linen, embroidered with needlework” (Exod. 26:36).

Clearly, the Lord loves cherubim, almond blossoms, and blue, purple, and crimson yarns. Far from being superfluous fancies, each is pregnant with meaning and symbolism. Saint John of Damascus asks, “And who will say that these images are not loudly sounding heralds?” The almond blossom represents the priesthood, as Aaron’s rod sprouted almonds and blossoms to indicate his role in the priesthood in Numbers 17:8. Blue, purple, and crimson were not only dyestuffs available to the Israelites, pointing to the Lord’s providence, but each color had its own meaning. Blue has traditionally been believed to represent the heavens; purple, royalty; and red, sacrifice.

In Pattern There Is Life, photograph by Holly Guertin. Used by permission.

One of my favorite textile anecdotes is how purple became associated with royalty. The dyestuff that created Tyrian purple dye came from the murex shellfish. To extract the purple dye, harvesters had to collect murex shellfish from the sea, break them open individually, fish out the small amount of dye from a gland inside the animal, add it to a pot full of thousands more glands, then boil it all down to create a saturated color. Because of the difficulty of harvesting it, Tyrian purple dye was incredibly expensive and often only affordable for royalty. Because of its origin, the fabrics usually carried a distinct smell that was also exclusively attributed to royalty, despite its stench.

References to repeat patterns also appear in the design for the ephod, the priestly garment, in Exodus 28:33–34: “At the hem at the bottom you shall make pomegranates, woven of violet, purple, and scarlet yarn and fine linen twined, with gold bells between them; a gold bell, a pomegranate, a gold bell, a pomegranate, all around the hem of the robe.” Repetition is found not only aesthetically throughout creation, but also experientially. As a mother, I am no stranger to repetition. The Guertin house loves a good routine, and there are many points of our days that are exactly the same as the day before. In the rhythms of daily life – the sun every morning, the waves crashing against the shore, the coming of the next season – repetition is part and parcel of the human experience. Once more, the Lord is making himself known in this expression of reliability, order, faithfulness, and providence. Infusing the humdrum and mundane with such spectacular declarations of his presence, repeat patterns reveal a God who is always with us. In his book The Rosary of Our Lady, Romano Guardini asks, “What objection can one raise against these repetitions and so many others? They are the order in which growth progresses, the inner kernel develops, and the form is revealed. All life realizes itself in the rhythm of external conditions and internal accomplishment.”

Just as I saw the majesty of the Lord throughout the surfaces of his world, I now see how he translated his glory through human hands in the creation of the Ark of the Covenant and through the priest’s ephod. The craftsmen Bezalel and Oholiab were given “a divine spirit, with ability, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, in every kind of craft” (Exod. 31:3–4) to create such magnificence worthy of housing the Lord. In my own work, I can see why I find such fulfillment and satisfaction in creating repeat patterns. In participation with his creativity and his creation, I am able to craft and design through the Holy Spirit.

While I may be enmeshed in the behind-the-scenes work of the fashion industry, I can see that culture at large is experiencing what Virginia Postrel has deemed “textile amnesia.” In The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, Postrel argues that because we have “textile abundance” (and she means abundance – we have enough clothing right now to outfit the next six generations, and the average US consumer throws away around 81.5 pounds of clothing each year), we have no reason to consider the labor background, the fiber makeup, or the prints and patterns on the clothes we choose every day. Because the fast fashion industry has been churning out cheaply made clothing at faster rates over the past four decades, our understanding of cloth and its decorations has been dramatically lost. The creativity and repeated elements in textiles are part of the language that the Father has been speaking from the beginning, but they are too often lost in translation.

In Numbers 15, the Lord tells Moses, “Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the fringe at each corner. You have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them.” Just as the Israelites were reminded of the Lord’s presence, his commandments, and his ultimate and fulfilling love through the Ark of the Covenant, the ephod, and the fringe on their garments, so too can we see how the repeated patterns throughout his creation praise and exalt him above all forever.