It has taken eight years and more than one million Madagascar golden orb spiders to create a work of art “with the quality of a fairy story”.
It goes on display at the V&A museum in London this week.
Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley — a textile artist and a designer and entrepreneur — have created a shimmering golden cape from spider silk, a fabric not woven in more than a century.
They stress that the spiders, big enough to cover the palm of a hand, were only “borrowed” from the forest, and returned after a day alive and kicking their eight legs.
Peers said they are “only mildly venomous”, but Godley has an impressive scar on his neck. “They do have quite a strong bite,” Peers said, “enough that you’d feel like shaking them off quite quickly.”
Peers learned about spider silk weaving in the 20 years he has lived and worked in Madagascar.
Illustrations survive of devices made in the 18th and 19th centuries for extracting silk from the spiders, which produce the extraordinary golden fibre only in one season of each year.
The glowing colour is natural, and unique to the species.
Reviving the art
Peers met the US-born Godley when he too set up a business in Madagascar, and the idea was born of reviving the industry to recreate an almost legendary fabric.
“There was a quality of a fairy story about it: to make something so extraordinary out of something so ordinary — everybody knows spider webs, you brush them out of your way every time you go for a walk,” Peers said.
The silk was extracted in Godley’s workshops and woven by Peers’ team of handloom weavers, but as it took eight years to produce and weave enough silk for a two-metre shawl and a richly embroidered cape, both on display at the museum until June 5, the fabric is never going to be a commercial proposition.
It took the silk from 23?000 spiders to weave 25 grammes of silk, and there are 1.5kg of silk in the cape. —