Caped Crusaders

As a cape woven from the silk of a million spiders comes to the V&A, Grant Gibson asks its creators, firstly how, and secondly, why?

‘This has only been attempted a few times and it’s clear why. Because it’s a crazy thing to do. It requires resource, time, people…’ Simon Peers hesitates for just a moment. ‘It’s a colossal undertaking.’ Peers and his partner Nick Godley are sat in one of the V&A’s back rooms discussing the extraordinary object in front of us – a cape made of silk collected from more than a million female golden orb spiders. The hand-woven, brocaded textile is naturally golden and took around four years to create, with the help of 80 spider catchers and a further 14 people transforming the raw material into a garment in Peers’s workshop in Antananarivo, Madagascar.

Heavily decorated using an array of embroidered and appliquéd motifs, there are hints of an Islamic pattern Peers found on fragments of tiles. However, you don’t have to look too closely to realise it’s dominated by arachnids. The design, says Peers, is about ‘looking into different cultures and societies that have seen the spider as the creator of the cosmos.’ The pair chose to make the cape for a number of reasons. ‘There was a nod to the superhero,’ explains Peers. ‘But also the cape is a ritualistic garment worn in rites. And finally, it’s a wonderful canvas. It’s a large area you can work on.’

The pair met on Madagascar in 1994. Peers, who was working in London’s art world before moving to the island, had become fascinated by traditional Madagascan textiles and had already spent time researching historic experiments with spider silk, while Godley, originally from New York, had a business making handbags in Mahajanga on the island’s North West coast. They initially collaborated on a collection of bags, before moving their attention elsewhere. The idea to make items from spider silk happened when the American spotted an ancient-looking machined part in the Englishman’s office and asked what it was for. ‘To milk spiders,’ was emphatically not the answer he anticipated.

‘Over the years we just revisited the idea to the point where we decided together to make a go of it,’ says Godley. He closed his factory and moved to Antananarivo with some of his key workers, while Peers set about building the first spider milking machine. The first piece they created was a three-metre-long Malagasy textile based on traditional weaves found in the island’s highlands, which was first shown at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2009, before moving to the Art Institute of Chicago.