Thousands of naturally dyed recycled fabrics, rolled into long strands and knotted onto rope, hang from a wire fence at Steele Elementary School, on the north side of Washington Park. The various orange, green, yellow and sea blue knots come from t-shirts that artist Maki Teshima and volunteers collected around the city.
The wall of fabric and popsicle sticks is out in the open, vulnerable to nature's rainy weather and the bustling traffic down S. Marion Parkway.
"Part of this artwork is to show how color fades, how it changes," Teshima said. "I want to show a concept of impermanence. We are so used to bright, deep, chemically dyed colors. So it's okay if it fades because it's natural."
Teshima, a botanical dye fiber artist in Denver, completed her first public art installation earlier this week, supported by the arts grant program Insite Fund from the Redline Contemporary Art Center, as part of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Regional Re-granting Program.
The installation, titled Musubi // Connections, is meant to provide a visual reminder of connectedness within the Wash Park community.
Teshima asked people to create wishing knots, known as Kanou Musubi, during workshops held across the city for the last couple months. Each strand of fabric was naturally dyed by Teshima herself, using many hyper-local, natural materials from personal gardens, including the one at Steele Elementary.
"Even invasive plants, food waste, nuts fallen down on the ground have some natural beauty to extract," Teshima said.
Next to the wishing knots are hundreds of popsicle sticks with wishes that community members wrote. Some include wishes for world peace, others wish for ice cream or candy, and Teshima said lots of children wished for puppies.
"Sometimes with adults, they had a hard time writing down wishes," Teshima said. "Maybe they were thinking too much or they hadn't thought about it for a while, what their wish is, what their dreams are."
Teshima's passion for naturally dyeing fabric, showcased during her KoiNobori: Swimming Upstream exhibit at Access Gallery earlier this year, grew out of 15 years of working as a textile surface designer in New York.
The public art is now available for visitors to observe and peruse, and it's scheduled to remain up until the fall.
This is only the first phase of the broader installation: Teshima hopes to complete the second phase by the end of August, where she will put up personally curated knot displays in random places in Denver for people to find.
