Production of silk weft hol pidan

HOL PIDAN

Technically it is an enormous challenge for a weaver to create pictorial scenes, including realistic figures featuring curving lines and fine detail, in the medium of silk weft hol. In comparison, the painter’s task and tools are relatively easy. But for a weaver creating such detail in a pidan is much more complex. Firstly she does not, as a painter might, embark on preliminary sketches. Nor can she outline the complete design on a ready-prepared canvas and then fill in the color, shading or other details. Instead, the forms within the design are conjured up from an apparently random sequence of per-dyed sections on each weft pick. An additional level of complexity resides in the fact that by using the hol technique the canvas itself  is fabricated line bye line, or indeed weft pick bye weft pick, concurrently, with the seemingly magical emergence of the design. The clarity and aesthetic success of the final image depends on the artistry and masterly skill specific to that weaver. What distinguishes the ability of one weaver compared with another is her ability to delicately place the resist ties, to manipulate a small number of weft threads for tying , and to plan the colour sequence of the dye baths into which the threads are plunged. Mistakes in dyeing cannot simply bye erased. 

Antique Cambodian silk weft hol pidan share a number of design scheme features with sampot hol hip wrapper cloths. They are woven in lengths of approximately one and a half or three meters the width, generally being eighty to ninety cm. Both forms usually have borders and end panels. The ground weave is in uneven twill. The background of the central field is often zone-dyed to differentiate it from the borders and end panels. Because of these similarities pidan may be confused with hip wrappers except for two principal distinguishing features. Firstly, the names of donors or invocations in  pali painted, woven or embroidered in Khmer script along the borders of any particular cloth, indicate that they were donated to the temple. Secondly, the use of particular cloths, such as figures of the Buddha and of stupa forms or pagodas, would render the pattern unsuitable for hipwrappers as this would show disrespect. 

Pidan patterns are usually composed for horizontal viewing being oriented along the cloths longitudinal axis from one warp end to the other. In some rare examples, however, the design is composed in the weft direction to be viewed between the selvages. Compositions feature one, two and sometimes partial repeat s of the principal motif portrayed in the central field. Others feature multiple repeats. In one particular group a complete narrative based on a single theme fills the formal composition. In the majority, however, individual motifs are presented in vertical columns of identical repeats which form simultaneously horizontal registers across the central field. This approach to composition makes the task of resist-dyeing the weft threads much easier as the weaver simply repeats a relatively short sequence as many times as required.