This article is written by Uthra Rajgopal, who worked with Five P to develop their website and promotional material during a textile exploration trip around India last year. An art history post- graduate and currently a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, Uthra is conducting research into Khadi and Handloom in India, and will be presenting at the forthcoming Textile Society of America conference in October. Above Photo: Mr.Kandasamy on a jacquard loom in the Five P workshop. Photo: Ruth Clifford Chenimalai is a small town about 25 km from Erode, at the centre of the ‘cotton belt’ between the textile hubs of Coimbatore and Salem in Tamil Nadu. The area has a long…
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Textiles in Depth: Handloom Weaving in India, Part one
I have just returned from a month long trip to India, three and a half years after my last trip. After a few days of settling into a very different time zone, climate and pace of life, I soon felt quite at home, the places and people I visited seeming as familiar as if I’d seen them only a few weeks before. A busy schedule and little access to the internet meant I couldn’t blog about the trip as I went, so this is the start of a series of blog posts in which I will write about my encounters with various textile artisans – this time mainly weavers, as…
