Off the Web

The V&A have put together an astonishing exhibition of such delicacy and intricacy, one almost questions its credulity.

Imagine going out into the highlands of Madagascar, coming back to a workshop in the capital Antananarivo with two dozen female Golden Orb Weaver spiders, putting each one in a specially-designed harness, extracting the silk by agitating its abdomen, winding it onto bobbins and then releasing the spiders back into the wild at the end of the day.

Continue this process for five years, until 1.2 million spiders have produced enough warp. Each warp is made up of 96 strands of spider silk, and there are something approaching 500,000 individual strands needed. The end result is an extraordinary cape, in the form of an ecclesiastical chasuble, decorated with thousands of embroidered and appliquéd motifs, representing the spider in myth and metaphor.

This, and a four metre long brocaded shawl, was made by Simon Peers, an Englishman living in Madagascar, with Nicholas Godley, an American who also worked for many years there, and were inspired by mid 17th  and 19th century accounts of this forgotten art. The cape weighs just over two and a half pounds, and the lightness of spider silk has been demonstrated by placing a ball of it on a blindfolded person's upturned hand, with the recipient unable to register its presence. The reason that these two gentlemen wanted to create an article of clothing, rather than simply a wall-hanging, was because they liked the somewhat creepy notion that the wearer would be literally cocooned in silk, in the way a spider's victim would be. Simon Peers added that spiders have not only inspired poetry and legend, they represent some of man's innermost fears and nightmares. This shining golden cape, however, surely inhabits the world of dreams.

Don Grant

Yellow woven spider silk cape (detail)
Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley at Peers workshop Antananarivo,
Madagascar. 2011
© V&A Images