Arachne’s thread

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Frances Follin has her arachnophobia challenged by the irresistible beauty of a legendary textile

Frightened of spiders? Ever milked one? Imagine catching a spider the size of your hand, putting it in ‘stocks’ so it could not escape, then drawing out the ever-growing thread of golden gossamer from its spinnerets and winding it on a bobbin.  You do that with 1.2 million spiders, twist 24 strands of their gossamer to make one thread and twist four of these into a 96-strand thread that you can actually weave. Use these threads in pairs for the ground weft of your weaving machine. Use ten such threads to create floating brocaded patterns… With 23,000 spiders needed to make an ounce of silk, the figures become mind boggling – but so are the end results: a piece of brocaded spider silk over two metres long, and an embroidered, golden cape fit for the sacred rituals of some magical religion.

The spiders concerned – Golden Orb Weaver spiders – are found in Madagascar, an island traditionally associated with the magical and bizarre. Once believed to be the home of the roc, a mythical giant bird big enough to carry off an elephant, Madagascar seems the appropriate place to find creatures that naturally spin golden threads. On the bobbins displayed at the current V&A showing of these amazing textiles, the threads really do look like spun gold. Once woven they appear somewhat muted by comparison – a glowing sunshine yellow.

The cape and brocade, on show at the V&A until 5 June, are the creations of Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley. Almost incredibly, they are not the first to undertake the impossible-seeming feat of producing enough spider silk to create a garment. There are historical accounts of varying reliability. In 1709 the French Duc du Noailles is said to have presented the Duchess of Bourgogne with a pair of spider silk stockings created by Francois-Xavier Bon. Bon devoted years of his life to researching and creating spider silk. The Empress of Austria and Germany was another recipient of his work – in her case a pair of gloves. He supposedly made a waistcoat for Louis XIV of France, but that is a dubious tale.

Bon’s researches were aimed at creating an industry that would replace Chinese silk with a European product (he used domestic spiders, not Madagascan). As spiders are cannibalistic carnivores, farming them is impossible. Also, the silk he managed to produce lacked the lustre of Chinese silk, because of the rough treatment necessary to extract it from the egg cocoons. Jonathan Swift mocked Bon’s endeavours in Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

Later researchers endeavoured to create spider silk, with some success. A Spanish Jesuit, Raimondo Maria de Termeyer, devised the ‘stocks’ necessary to hold a single spider so that its silk could be drawn out as a single thread. This retained the natural lustre of the thread. De Termeyer made several purses and a pair of stockings for King Charles III of Spain. Further experiments continued in the 19th century and by 1900 a Frenchman, Nogué was able to create a set of bed hangings for that year’s Exposition Universelle in Paris. The accounts of these are somewhat contradictory, as the records do not suggest that enough silk could have been produced to make up the articles described. These, like most of the articles mentioned in historical accounts, have not survived.

Undeterred by past problems and failures, and being already based in the textile industry in Madagascar, Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley drew on the work of their predecessors. They decided to use teams of people to catch the spiders on a daily basis, releasing them into the wild at night. The highlands of Madagascar teem with the Golden Orb Weaver spiders but the effort to catch over a million of them is best left to the reader’s imagination.

The work carried on over an eight-year period. The aim from the outset was to create textiles that would have emotional, aesthetic and intellectual appeal. The single large piece of cloth (shown in our lightbox), actually made up of seven panels and two end bands, is woven with a brocaded pattern of traditional Madagascan motifs. These create an intricate surface pattern that reveals both variety and order as you examine it.

The cape, which is also lined with spider silk, weighs about 1.2 kilograms – amazingly lightweight for a heavily embroidered, lined article that reaches past the knees and almost to the wrists of the model shown wearing it in our lightbox image. The embroidery, in thick strands of spider silk, features a pattern of spiders, flowers, and leaves. An image mounted near the cape in the V&A display shows the various poems and writings that inspired the design.

The cape has a ceremonial appearance. Simon Peers told me that in ancient China the Empress had to perform an annual ritual at the altar of the silkworm in the Forbidden City, and he liked to think of the cape as being something that might be worn in an equivalent ceremony in Madagascar. Of course, there is no such ritual but it is a lovely idea, and certainly the cape has more in common with, say, Beryl Dean’s ecclesiastical embroideries than with anything most of us would ever be likely to wear. What we are invited to do is to look at it and experience genuine wonderment at the almost impossible made real.