Michael Sylvan Robinson

The Singer’s Robe for the “Song of Ruin” (2006)
Mixed media on fabric: transferred images, acrylic paint, fabric, beads, yarns and threads, found objects, wire, vintage fabrics, antique laces, acrylic hair extensions, buttons, costume jewelry, antique fabric doll, semi precious stones.

“Singer’s Robe for the Song of Ruin,” Detail #1

“Singer’s Robe for the Song of Ruin,” Detail #2

“Wearing the Song of Ruin”
The Ruin Song was lengthy and exhausting. It began with the beginning of time , telling the entire story of the people over countless centuries. It was frightening too. The story of the past was filled with warfare and disasters.

...Kira’s mother had known the art of dye. It was from her stained hands that the colored threads used for rare ornamentation were produced. The robe worn each year by the Singer when he performed The Ruin Song was richly embroidered. The intricate scenes on it had been there for centuries, and the robe had been worn by each Singer and passed from one to the next...
-Lois Lowery. Gathering Blue.

This work was inspired by Lois Lowry’s dystopian trilogy for young readers in which the annual ritual singing of an epic poem holds the collective memory of a post apocalyptic community’s ancestral past its images stitched into the Singer’s robe. I decided to create the robe as I imagined it, and in doing so, I also unearth the song through my own voice and body. I saw myself as both the Singer who wears the robe and Stitcher whose human hands pieced together its terrible images in layers of colored thread; these two processes of investigation wove together into a ritual process. In meditation and trance, I let the images rise up from within, from ancestral voices and stories, from the earth itself. I opened to the images, sung and chanted, danced the beginnings of language, until I found words which became my poetic text.
Then I began to stitch. Images of pioneer women appeared to me as I sat to embroider and quilt fabric, with a simple needle and thread, working steadily, stitch by individual stitch. As I appliqued vintage textiles, needle points and hand made laces, I was touching, reinterpreting in a modern art practice, the work of those “anonymous” women whose art I held in my hands. The robe has a back panel, two front panels, with four panels to make up the sleeves. It is based on a kimono pattern. I knew I wanted the robe to be a new direction in my work as a mixed media artist, and I wanted to reconnect with my earlier work as a costume designer. The Singer’s Robe is designed to be a wearable sculpture and, even though it could be worn as a costume, it is an art object within the context of sacred drama.

The images themselves were a fascinating exploration. The entire back panel, the largest of the piece, is made up of images of war. Some of the images are contemporary, including one frightening image from Basra, while others are photographs from the our history of conflicts including the WWII and the US civil war. I questioned the possible exploitation of the victims whose tragedies were photographed even when the web sites on which I found the images were designed to prevent further atrocities and I was challenged by the use of appropriated images.. These questions will continue to be part of the framework of my ongoing inquiry. Here, I chose primarily to use images created by other artists, photographers, and historians. In engaging with this work I found as sense of allied strength and art activism. I also experienced great suffering and anguish in response to images I saw in my search many of which I could or would not use in this art piece. The image of a woman from Rwanda being horribly tortured will probably never leave my consciousness. Anger, fury, deep grief, shock and sadness all flooded through me in response to what I will never be able to understand. How could anyone torture another living being? My feelings of powerlessness in facing this truth was a humbling lesson. The Singer’s Robe became the embodiment of this journey, a physical vessel for my experience as singer of the “Song of Ruin.”