Tim Harding (1950–)

Koi, 1991

Layered, quilted, slashed, and frayed Dupioni silk

56 x 60½ inches

Purchased with funds donated by Twin Cities Mazda Dealers, Elizabeth and Robert Gunderson, Mona Meyer, McGrath & Gavin, Cray Research, Incorporated, and an anonymous donor, 92.16.1

Essay by Marcia Anderson
Independent scholar, formerly Minnesota Historical Society

            Over the centuries clothing and textiles have been meaningful indicators of power.  They have validated (and demonstrated) exploitation, entrepreneurial success, and international aesthetic trends.  Tim Harding’s wearables and wall pieces reference historical costume and textile traditions while, at the same time, incorporating a distinctive use of color and an innovative technique that has been his signature characteristic for over 30 years—much imitated but never replicated or equaled.  Unlike many wearable artists, Harding maintains a successful apparel production enterprise that does not impede his creation of one-of-a-kind studio fiber art pieces.  His wall pieces are widely seen in public installations and galleries, as well as in his booths at the American Craft Council show in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Smithsonian Craft Show, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

            The majority of international wearable artists continue to focus their creative energies on garment embellishment or garment creation employing fibers manipulated during the construction process by use of knotting, plying, and needle art techniques.  In contrast, Tim Harding’s reverse-appliqué technique employs the bold destruction or removal of fabric, resulting in separation of the core elements of fabric—the warps and wefts themselves.

            When he first began experimenting with cloth as an art canvas, Harding was inspired by the practice of cutting or slashing the sleeves and breeches of fashionable silk garments worn by wealthy men and women from the late 1400s into the mid-1600s in France, England, Germany, and Spain.  The intent of that decorative element of period costume was to reveal splashes of color and texture to contrast with the surface fabric.  

Tim Harding’s approach, using layers of quilted, slashed, and frayed fabric, also successfully employs traditional ethnographic clothing forms as his canvas.  Harding selects, as do many artists (particularly weavers), the early garment patterns that preserve the most original yardage and yield the simplest of apparel—often enveloping the wearer in a loose wrap or arraying them in fluid drapery.  For centuries, fine fabrics were so precious and expensive that, as a consequence, the resulting garments were less fitted, due to construction and assembly methods that preserved as much of the original base material as possible without damaging it by cutting into it.  These unfitted garments (animal skins and hides in their earliest form), often opening to a near flat shape, provide the surface Harding uses so well to render a subject or colorplay on a supple and fluid canvas.  The Japanese kimono is a fine example of this tradition and a favorite form or inspiration for many of Harding's landscape garments.  He often adjusts the scale, however, to make the kimonos and other garments less human and more monumental, creating unwearable garments designed for wall display. 

            Harding’s Koi, a greatcoat in the collection of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, illustrates his masterful use of color and form to create emotive silk paintings.  The realistic rendering of the movement of koi (Japanese ornamental carp) below the reflective blue water’s surface renders an impressionistic, yet immediately recognizable, image employing windows of light and color that are as changeable as the silks themselves.  It is particularly symbolic that Harding chooses to present the koi on an interpretation of the Japanese kimono.  Koi is also an appropriate and significant complement to the fine crafts acquired by the Minnesota Museum of American Art from the juried Fiber—Clay—Metal shows, renowned craft exhibitions that the museum organized between 1952 and 1964.  The acquisition of such nationally recognized art wear lends depth and continuity to an important component of the museum’s holdings.

In the artist’s own words, his process manipulates the warp and weft of the fabric by juxtaposing control with a “looseness or freedom that allows the material to find its own form.”  The damage caused to the fabric by Harding’s slashing technique challenges the “preciousness and vulnerability” of the fine silk material.  His clothing and wall pieces are distinguished from the work of other wearable artists by his creation activity of “combining painterly and quilterly techniques.”  The result is a deconstruction process that manipulates and fragments the textile surface through layering and removal of fabric, producing controlled unpredictability. 

            Tim Harding’s oeuvre spans three decades of a still young art form.  His manipulation of textile fibers in non-traditional ways continues to evidence, as the artist himself writes on his website, “a continuum of applied, decorative and fine art.”[1]

[1] All quotes from the artist's website: www.timharding.com.