By Will Lerner, Communications Manager for Portland Japanese Garden & Japan Institute
In March, Portland Japanese Garden debuted its new art exhibition, Natural Patterns: Katazome Stencil Dyeing, featuring the katazome artistry of Oregon resident Karen Illman Miller. Initially used to add elaborate patterns onto commonly used fabrics, like cotton yukata, a style of lightweight kimono, katazome is a method of using exquisitely cut paper stencils and resist paste to dye fabrics. Today, katazome-created designs can be stand-alone art pieces, or are often found on noren curtains, futon covers, and furoshiki gift wraps. Miller, who has been creating this extraordinary art for 30 years, has her work on display in the Calvin and Mayho Tanabe Gallery in the Jordan Schnitzer Japanese Arts Learning Center through September 15.
To learn more about Miller’s fascinating transformation from marine biologist to practitioner of a lesser-known Japanese artform, we traveled to her handsome craftsman home in Corvallis, Oregon where she creates her pieces in a basement brimming with her work, supplies, and ideas. If you want to learn more about katazome itself, Miller discusses it here.
A Family of Naturalists and Artists
Raised in the San Francisco Bay area, Karen Illman Miller was born into a family that appreciated both nature and the arts. “My grandfather [Trevor Kincaid] was an early naturalist,” she shares. “He traveled to Japan in 1908 to look for parasites for the gypsy moth. He was a quite young entomologist, not even a full professor. My mother, growing up in that household, wound up seeing many Japanese prints and objects and that inspired her to become an ‘artist naturalist.’ She was a fine and accurate painter—her botanical works are just wonderful.”
This love of nature wasn’t purely academic, however. “We camped,” Miller recalls. “I was a tidepool lover from the time I could wade. I knew early on that marine biology was where I belonged. I didn’t have the stomach for ships, but an intertidal animal could get me excited. They were so beautiful.”
Miller’s life journey saw her initially follow a path not too dissimilar from her grandfather, who counted among his achievements the founding of the Friday Harbor Laboratories at the University of Washington. She earned a PhD in zoology and wound up studying oxygen binding proteins from octopuses over the course of 20 years, transitioning from tidepool biology to physical biochemistry. Miller, familiar with the Pacific Northwest from the family trips her Seattle-native parents would take her on, would settle in the area with her husband, Ed.
All the time, her artistic impulses merely lay dormant. A trip to Roseburg, Oregon would wake them up.
Meaning and Meaning-Making Through Science and the Arts
“I had no expectation that I would create katazome,” Miller admits. “But I became interested in indigo dyeing. Then a friend of mine told me an indigo dyer was coming to Roseburg to teach a class on that and katazome. So I drove myself down there in our new motor home, going the whole way in second gear. During this four-day class I cut my first stencil. It was a conversion experience—I knew that katazome was what I was supposed to do.”
She wound up taking courses with John Marshall, a textile dyer and artist who is recognized as a rare American-born leader in katazome. Miller would also travel to Japan to learn, spending time in a Kyoto workshop that was connected to Keisuke Serizawa (1895-1984), whose work in the medium earned him recognition as a Living National Treasure. However, the bulk of her learning came from independent study.
To say Miller transitioned from scientist to artist would not be entirely accurate. It’s a complicated world so it’s understandable that we seek to taxonomize things neatly into their own distinct categories. Among the most common ways we do this is by separating the arts and science. We parrot the conventional and possibly misinformed tropes of being “left-brained” or “right-brained,” forgetting the lines we draw wouldn’t exist without our hand. And yet, the qualities that shape the great artists and scientists converge often, whether it’s innate curiosity or the ability to express complicated ideas. Dr. Hideo Mabuchi of Stanford University, a physicist and ceramicist, has described the intersection as a place where one gets to contemplate “meaning and meaning-making.”
“For a long time, I didn’t know I was an artist,” Miller says. “I thought I was ‘just’ a scientist. But really, I could never have worked on anything as a scientist that I didn’t find beautiful. I love natural history and the design and the patterns of the animals and plants that I studied. I turned that immediately into the imagery that I use in my artwork. It’s all just the two sides of the same coin.”
Patterns Discovered From Nature’s Wealth of Beauty
When guests view Miller’s work in the Calvin and Mayho Tanabe Gallery, they’ll notice that the natural world is ever present. “I care deeply that what I depict is biologically accurate as well as beautiful,” Miller shares in her artist statement. “Although I am not an abstract artist, pattern is my passion, pattern found in natural forms, detailed biological images like tree branches, leaf skeletons, or marine animals and especially the abstractions nature produces. Why invent when nature supplies such a wealth of beauty to use in my art?”
While accuracy is something Miller aims for, she’s less stringent than when she began. “I started out being literal-minded about the imagery that I was selecting to depict,” she shares. “I wanted things to look like what they really were. But the first time I went to Japan, I saw an exhibit and there was a length of fabric that somebody had dyed using a beautiful botanical image. Only, you didn’t know what [the botanical image] was. I was so inspired to think about hunting for pattern as it exists in the world, independent of what it might be from.”
“Looking at the world and seeing all of the patterns I had been blind to before came as a real revelation. I suddenly understood that there was this rich world of natural pattern that became abstractions depending on what your point of view was. And for me, that was a big source of inspiration for some of my later work.”
Tapping into nature’s “wealth of beauty” led Miller to create a katazome depiction one of Portland Japanese Garden’s most iconic plants: “The Tree.” A maple on the northern end of the Strolling Pond Garden. The Tree became a beloved subject of photographers from all around the world when a stunning photograph of it was featured in National Geographic.
“The Tree has been photographed by everybody in the universe that ever visited the Garden, but I don’t think anybody ever did it in katazome,” she suggests. “I was at the Garden this fall and the tree was just at the point where it wasn’t so covered with leaves that you couldn’t see the structure. I took a photograph and said, ‘You know, I think I can probably cut a stencil from that. I bet I can make The Tree.’ I had done a lot of very delicate tree branch stencils and many, many leaf skeletons. But the sculptural quality of that trunk is really pretty magical. I thought I could adapt that and generate some original art so I did.”
A Shared Impulse
Miller, naturally, is a fan of the beauty one can find at Portland Japanese Garden. When asked her favorite space, she landed on the Flat Garden. “To sit on a bench outside the Pavilion with that panorama in front of me creates deep peace, always. The serenity of that spot, the miniature landscape, it’s special to me.”
She feels that Natural Patterns: Katazome Stencil Dyeing is natural fit at the Garden. “The Japanese have enormous reverence for their own natural history,” she explains. “You see it in their art and in their textiles and in their gardens. That’s certainly reflected at Portland Japanese Garden, and it’s reflected in my work. That same impulse that creates a beautiful garden is what inspired me to make art as well. I’m not just copying things because people like peonies on their wall. I respect the fact that peonies bloom in June and they don’t last very long, and they’re shaped in a particular way. It’s all part of that same reverence. Even when I choose images that come from my own natural history, which has different plants and animals from what you see in Japan, the impulse is the same.”
“To get the validation of the curatorial team at the Garden for what I’ve spent a third of my life doing is really significant for me,” Miller continues. “You don’t bring in artists there that aren’t at the top of their game. It’s an enormous honor for me to be included. There just aren’t words. There just aren’t words.”
“I hope [visitors to Natural Patterns: Katazome Stencil Dyeing] understand that years of devotion to a single craft can pay off in ways that trying one of everything doesn’t,” Miller concludes. “I have spent a lot of time narrowing my focus and perfecting my technique. It allows me to express things that are sometimes otherwise hard to express. I have grown along with my craft, and I think visitors will be able to see that in the kinds of imagery that I have chosen that no Japanese stencil dyer in his right mind would probably ever consider!”