6
Knots and Writing

In 1964 Anni Albers, referring to a newly created lithograph, remarked: “Though this is not a weaving, threads seem to be my theme, even when leaving the textile medium.” Perhaps as early as her visits to Berlin’s ­Ethnological Museum in the 1920s, but certainly in her travels to Chile and Peru in the early 1950s, Albers came upon the Quipu, an intricate system of knotted strings of camelid or cotton fibres that functioned as a means of counting, recording, and communicating in Andean social life.

Although research into the interpretation of Quipus was in its infancy at the time, Albers intuited that writing need not be confined to the printed or written page, and that Andean weavers had developed the Quipu as a primary medium of expression, with its own language. The Quipus’ knotted structure carried meanings conveyed by the type of knots as well as their colour, size, and placement.

Albers’s intimately scaled weavings Haiku and Code refer to such coded languages in their titles and in the irregularly scattered knots that penetrate the woven surface of the textile amongst floating lines, subverting the strict geometry of warp and weft. Her forays into the expressive potential of Quipu-like knots are an invitation to her audience to “read” the textiles.

Albers extended the reference to coded writing in large-scale textiles like Six Prayers where she drew on the texts encoded in the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in the Judean Desert in the late 1940s and 1950s, and first exhibited in the USA in 1965 at the Library of Congress in ­Washington DC. For Albers, the silver threads in Six Prayers evoked the metallic quality of the writing on the scrolls and gave the panels a “ceremonial character.”