The Northern Light

Media Credit: Kenna Bates - The Northern Light Dave Robinson weaves rugs out of recycled materials and fibers and displays them in the campus bookstore. The sampler is a collection of weaving that uses the leftover fibers from various finished projects. When something is cut off the loom, about 20 in [Click to enlarge]

David Robinson's workspace consists of two desks and several cabinets on the second story of UAA's campus bookstore. The area is littered with unsurprising office doodads: paperclip containers, ballpoint pens, a toy truck turned upside down atop a stack of faded National Geographics.

Less apparent is the fact that Robinson's own artwork is all around. Just visible beneath paperweights, computer monitors and pencil sharpeners are the fringes of homemade textiles that Robinson has been creating for 30 years.

"I was working a maintenance job in Pittsburg from 6:00 in the evening until 2:00 in the morning, and I needed something to do with the rest of my day," he said. "I met a woman who was a weaver, and she suggested I take it up."

Robinson, a wiry-haired man with John Lennon glasses, showed me two bundles of yarn. The first was dyed ethereal blue and indigo and composed of something called banana silk. The second bundle seemed a kaleidoscopic chaos of every color imaginable.

"It's made from Indian saris that were going to be thrown out," Robinson said, turning the yarn bundle in his hands. "A co-op over there shreds the saris and makes the yarn. I buy a lot of material now from Third-World co-ops. They're people who can use the money. And the banana silk is separated from the bark of banana trees. They don't have to kill the trees."

I went to speak with Robinson about the concept of sustainability, one of the chic new buzzwords being written on flipcharts in corporate, civic and academic conference rooms around the nation. The term "sustainability" means always keeping one eye on the future, and it encompasses everything from recycling and alternative energy sources, to the self-sufficient village health banks and clinics set up by Project Hope from Guatemala to Malawi.

It also includes the soft-spoken Robinson who, for the last five years, has used salvaged and recycled materials to make his textiles.

But Robinson seemed reluctant to advertise any new environmental paradigm. I asked how much difference he makes by using recycled products, and he scrunched together the tips of forefinger and thumb.

"Teensy weensy," he said.

Robinson isn't as interested in the cutting-edge terminology of ecosystems and environmental impact as he is in the centuries-old vocabulary of the weaving arts. Demonstrating on an Aircraft loom smaller than a toaster oven, he took me step by step through the process. He showed me the reed, a row of tines so densely packed they seem to merge into one surface like whale's baleen. After pulling yarn through "dents" €" gaps between tines €" the weaver runs each thread through a series of tiny loops called heddles. These in turn can be elevated or depressed with the use of four levers, creating rhythmic cadences in the finished cloth.

"I can do 1-2, 1-2, or 2-4, 2-4. I can arrange them any way I want," Robinson said.

Robinson's larger tapestries contain over seven hundred threads, each of which he individually draws out on one of two full-size looms occupying much of the space in his trailer home.

"I don't go to weaver's groups; I just work on my own. I'll listen to audio books, John Grisham or Harry Potter, stuff I don't have to think much about."

Robinson has moved from Pittsburg to Puerto Rico to Anchorage, where he now works as a textbook buyer for UAA. All the while he's carried on with weaving, never losing his inspiration. Occasionally he's done commissioned works for stores like One People, but now he simply makes them according to how he feels and whatever yarn he has handy. Using recycled fabrics has eliminated the long hours he used to spend trying to get just the right colors.

"When I buy waste fabrics from a company like Pendleton, they're very clear: 'This is waste and you have to take what you can get and you can't return it,'" he said.

Robinson gives his art away to friends or keeps it buried beneath supplies on his office desk. Over the years he's picked up new techniques such as overshot weaving but doubts he'll ever attain the expertise of his favorite weavers, such as Peter Collingwood. Still, he continues to produce new work at a steady pace and happily teaches younger weavers the skills he knows.

"Weaving has always been around and always will be. The main skill that I've learned from doing it is patience."

After the interview, I stepped outside the glass doors of the bookstore where the windowsills are cluttered with used publications free for the taking. Handbooks to the "revolutionary Atkins Diet" abound, as do issues of "TV Guide" offering everything from "The Passion of Mel Gibson" to "The Ultimate Companion to Battlestar Galactica."

In this world of cheap fads, instant fame and creative burnout, David Robinson brings a quiet patience to his work that seems worth paying attention to. In 10 or 20 years, academics will have dropped the concept of "sustainable development" in favor of some newer, hotter idea. But the type of sustained inspiration that Robinson brings to his textile art will still be remarkable.

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