NEW YORK – An extremely rare textile, woven from gold-colored silk thread produced by more than one million spiders in Madagascar, is on display at the American Museum of Natural History's grand gallery, here. The contemporary textile, measuring 11'x 4’, took four years to make .

The textile is on loan from Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley. Peers founded "lamba," an enterprise specializing in weaving, embroidery, and passementerie in Madagascar, working with architects and designers around the world. Lamba's regular silk textiles have been acquired by museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago, the National Museum of African Art, the Smithsonian, and the British Museum.

Godley arrived in Madagascar in 1994 and created a small manufacturing company specializing in raffia products. He launched his first collection of fashion handbags in 1999 at Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus. In 2005, Godley closed the factory and moved key personnel and resources to Antananarivo, Madagascar to work on the spider silk partnership with Peers.


The unique textile was created drawing on the legacy of a French missionary, Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar in the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué worked to collect and weave spider silk but with limited success, and no surviving textile is now known to exist. Previously, the only known spider-silk textile of note was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, and it was subsequently lost, according to the Museum.

Producing the spider silk, the only example of its kind displayed  in the world, involved the efforts of 70 people who collected spiders daily from webs on telephone wires, using long poles, the Museum explained. "These spiders were all collected during the rainy season, the only time when they produce silk,  from Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and the surrounding countryside. These giant spider webs are a well-known feature of the capital, and frequently surprise international visitors. A dozen more people were needed to draw the silk from the spiders with hand-powered machines, with each spider producing about 80 feet of silk filament," the Museum said.  

The intricately-patterned spider silk features stylized birds and flowers and is based on a weaving tradition known as lamba Akotifahana from the highlands of Madagascar, an art reserved for the royal and upper classes of the Merina people who are concentrated in the Central highlands. In this unique lamba cloth, the individual threads used for weaving are made by twisting 96 to 960 individual spider silk filaments together.

The silk fiber was gathered from the female golden orb spider (Nephila madagascariensis), which is known for the lustrous golden hue of its silk fiber. The male spider does not produce silk. The golden orb spider of Madagascar is just one of about 36 members of the Nephila genus. These spiders are found throughout the tropics and are known as golden orb weavers for their big, gold-colored webs. The webs can often be seen between telephone and electrical wires and are sometimes large enough to span a one-lane road.

Almost all silk fabric is made from silkworm moth cocoons, but people have occasionally tried to make cloth from spider silk. "One of the biggest challenges is the cannibalistic nature of spiders, which makes it very difficult to raise them in captivity, unlike silkworms," the Museum said. Spiders can be collected in the wild and then placed in a device to keep them still so the silk can be drawn. Afterwards, the spiders are released back into the wild.

For its weight, spider silk is stronger than steel, but unlike steel it can stretch up to 40% of its normal length. Scientists are trying to produce this material artificially on a large scale for possible uses on the battlefield, in surgery, for space exploration, and elsewhere. Since raising spiders has proven difficult, researchers are investigating ways to replicate spider silk to avoid harvesting. However, spider silk is difficult to mimic in a lab because the silk begins as a liquid in the spider's gland, becoming a remarkably strong, water-resistant solid after following a complicated course through the spider's interior.

The curator for the spider silk is Ian Tattersall, curator, Division of Anthropology, with consulting by Norman Platnick, curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology.

ED NOTE:  Rugnews.com thanks M. Dalaeli of www.rugnrug.com for the tip on this story.


05.10.10