Bolaji Fagbemi

Fagbemi's grandmother kept two indigo pits behind a compound wall in Itoku and dyed for the market until her eyes went. At nineteen Fagbemi took work as field assistant to a hydrologist on the Ogun River, filling turbidity and stage-height logs twice a day for twenty-six months in a ruled notebook with a column for rain. The cloths are those notebooks. A band's width is a week, its darkness is silt, and she will point out which panel is the flood of the year she quit the job.

She draws the resist freehand with cassava paste through a chicken-feather quill onto strip cotton bought in Ilaro, then dips: fourteen times for the darkest bands, twice for the palest, in a pit fermented with elu leaves, wood-ash lye and patience. The paste cracks as it dries and leaves the hairline veining she now composes with deliberately. Her first year she used synthetic indigo from a Lagos market and a collector returned a panel with a blue shadow on his white sofa. She rebuilt the pit on her grandmother's ash recipe and soured three vats before one held.

Panels run four metres, hang from a brass rod unstretched and unglazed, and she requires that people be permitted to touch the bottom edge. She dyes only in Abeokuta, since Berlin water is chlorinated and the pit sulks, so the Berlin flat is for stitching and arguing with registrars. She has turned down two fashion collaborations, one of them a jacket, and finds the word artisanal funny in a way that makes buyers shift their weight.