Textiles are closely connected with us as human beings and our surroundings. Indeed we rely on them to survive, for warmth and shelter. The processes, materials and qualities of textiles provide metaphors to describe the society we’re in as well as symbolising and holding affinity with important life processes. Textiles as language can be explored through history, etymology and metaphor. The metaphors of spinning appear regularly in the ancient Hindu texts including the Vedas, Upanishads explained by Puntambekar and Varadachari in their book Hand-Spinning and Hand-Weaving (1926). ‘When the poet sings his invocation to Agni, he asks of the gods “to spin out the ancient thread”. The continuity of life itself and of…
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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…
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Made in Mexico: The Rebozo in Art, Culture and Fashion
Made in Mexico, the Rebozo in Art, Culture and fashion at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London displays the traditional woven shawl or scarf of Mexico in a variety of contexts and designs. The exhibit fits well with the distinctive vibrant and colourful style of founder Zandra Rhodes and the building’s fuscia pink exterior. I’ve always loved the textiles of Mexico and so was keen to see what this exhibition had to offer. Embedded in the humble rebozo is the rich culture of Mexico and the story of the person wearing it. It reflects the long and rich history of Mexican textiles that date back hundreds of years before the Spanish conquest,…
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Paisley and the Pashmina
On my way back from a recent trip to Scotland, I stopped in Paisley near Glasgow to visit its Museum which features a permanent exhibition on what the town is most famous for – shawl weaving. The well known Paisley pattern was named after the small town near Glasgow that adopted the tradition of weaving Paisley Pashmina shawls, providing a cheaper version of the shawls being brought from Kashmir by the East India Company and later by soldiers returning from the colony. Manufacturers caught on to the huge popularity in Britain. Paisley was not the first to start weaving these shawls, Norwich was the first to produce the shawls followed…
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A little bit of Kachchh in Manchester
An exchange project organised by A Fine Line involved two artists Lokesh Ghai, textile artist and graduate of National institute of Fashion Technology in Ahmedabad, and teacher at Kala Raksha in Kachchh, and Shamji Vishram, a weaver from Bhujodi, Kachchh exhibiting their work and carrying out workshops in various galleries in the North West. These included the Harris Museum, Platt Hall Gallery of Costume, Queen Street Mill in Burnley and Manchester Art Gallery. An opening at the latter gallery involved craft demonstrations, music, Gujarati food and chai, as did the closing party at Platt Hall two weeks ago. The project LOkesh worked on during the residency was inspired by Lancashire’s historic…
