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Cathy Kata – a cat walk on the highlands

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Cathy Kata lives in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, in Goroke. Like a number of other PNG makers, she has adapted traditional bilum weaving techniques to clothes and fashion. Her seamless skirts and tops are made with the same hand-looped, woven in the round techniques as bags.

Cathy decided to leave her career as the secretary of an academic department at the University of Goroka and focus on becoming a bilum designer, venturing into bilum fashion wear. Her husband, Joseph Kata, admires her creativity and said that the opportunity for Cathy to take up a Jolika Fellowship in San Francisco gave her valuable exposure to other artists and designers. She is now preparing for a fashion show in the UK, working with other women in her home village in the Eastern Highlands fashioning the garments.

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High fashion garments are now proudly worn by beauty contestants in Miss PNG, Miss Melanesia and Miss Hiri Hanemano competitions, beauty contestants and in fashion parades like the annual Red Cross Miss PNG Ball, which attracting big media coverage.

Cathy’s work is remarkable in many ways. First, they have been able to translate powerful designs into beautifully shaped garments. Second, she is able to complete the transformation from craft to fashion herself. Cathy is part of an emerging generation of makers able to translate their own traditional culture into modern forms.

Cathy Kata is referred to in an article about bilum-wear for the After the Missionaries issue of Artlink. With luck, her work will also be part of the World of Small Things (still waiting for it to get through customs).

See also:

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Hlengiwe Dube – tin top buttons with Zulu style

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Hlengiwe Dube is a craftswoman and manager of the African Art Centre. In 2000, she was awarded the Woman of the Year award by the Department of Arts and Culture. As well as her own work, she has played a critical role in developing crafters in the area, particularly in beaded products. Dube has travelled widely to promote Zulu crafts, including participation in the South Project and the Common Goods exhibition by Craft Victoria. She has recently written Zulu Beadwork: Talk with Beads (Africa Direct).

Remarkably, Hlengiwe manages to sustain both her own work as a skilled crafter with a vocation for promoting Zulu crafts as a whole. She has a firm belief in self-reliance through craftwork and the richness of Zulu tradition. These combine in her recent products for beaded cell phone pouches and handbags ornamented with tin top buttons.

Craft is the third largest employer in the South African economy. For most poor people, is the only means by which they can advance themselves. With Hlengiwe’s recent work we see the great potential for product development in South African craft.

This is her statement about the work that she has made for The World of Small Things.

RECYCLED BAGS AND EARRINGS

I am very aware of the “Keep environment Clean “campaign and as a South African citizen, I am very perturbed at the amount of litter that is strewn about on the streets, the verges and the beaches. I had noticed that a lot of this litter comprised of cool drink cans.

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The government seems to have “won the war” on the plastic bag saga, but tin cans still contributes to a huge percentage of litter strewn about. I feel this matter needs serious attention.

I then came up with the idea of making bags using tin top buttons and earrings using bottle tops. I source my supply from the local dump, roadside bins and even have neighbours and street children collect them for me. I wash and sterilize them, and then they are ready to be weaved together and transformed into bags.

I weave the buttons using cotton and beads. I give the entire tin to the other artist who makes caps and belts.

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I enjoy weaving with recycle material and I also do lot of weaving with recycled telephone wire strings. I believe that weaving is the way of communicating with other people, in our culture women used to visit each other and bring their mats to weave and share ideas of how to take care of their families. For me weaving is to share my feeling through it, communicate with people through my weaving. I like to incorporate it with beads, because when I first fell in love with beads I was only 12 years old, since then I have been working with beads non stop and creating new ideas.

I always enjoy sharing my experience with other people to create jobs so that they can earn a living, because I believe that as long as you have two functional hands you will never starve.

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Janet DeBoos – hand-designed in Australia, factory-crafted in China

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In Australia, ceramics is under siege. Since the boom of the 1970s, the number of courses available have rapidly declined. For today’s iphone generation, the dedication required by clay-making poses a significant lifestyle challenge – it threatens to disconnect you from the ‘clouds’ of text and image that give meaning to the day. Of course, as craft advocates we perceive the danger that this will lead to a closed system, where our cultural ecology loses the language of the material world outside. In ceramics, we have a particularly primordial understanding of the ground on which we stand. Without this ‘earth’, we risk a cultural short-circuit.

Thankfully, Janet DeBoos has been successful in adapting ceramics education to this new generation through her model of the ‘distributed studio’. Sustaining this is a new audience that she has discovered which is deeply appreciative of Australian ceramics. But it’s not the white knight of the American collector, willing to pay thousands for a unique work. Rather, it is the Chinese factory owner who can see in the Australian ‘hands-on’ ceramic style something of great value to his growing middle class market.

Janet seemed destined to work in China. She first encountered Chinese ceramicists in the mid-seventies, when a delegation came to East Sydney Tech. In 1996, she received an invitation to be part of the First Western Yixing Teapot Symposium, where she was introduced to Zisha-ware. This was followed in 2001 with an invitation from The Chinese Ceramic Industry to attend and speak at the International Forum on the Development of Ceramic Art in Zibo, Shandong province.

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On the strength of her presentation, DeBoos was invited to return and make work with the factory. She has subsequently made work in collaboration with Prof. Zhang Shouzhi in which she produced the form and he provided the decoration. Shouzhi’s design is based on a traditional Ding-ware, though it is applied with a decal rather than traditional hand-carving. The company produce only for internal market as they prefer to make work of high standards rather than cut costs as would be demanded for export. 250 sets were made and subsequently all were sold at the Zibo ceramic Industry conference and expo at the end of 2007. They sold for twice the price they would attract in Australia.

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Janet’s experience reminds us how important it is to be open in dealings with businesses in China. While Australian craft has traditionally looked north (to the ‘developed’ countries in Europe, Japan and North America) to gauge its progress, the horizon needs to be broadened to engage with the emerging economies. In the case of China, the depth of appreciation for ceramics is something that a country like Australia could do well to import.

You can find an article by Janet about her China experience in the After the Missionaries issue of Artlink. The presentation set will be on display in the World of Small Things. Janet is current head of the ceramics department at the ANU School of Art, Canberra.

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Polly&me – masterpieces in idle chatter from Pakistan

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‘GupShup’ means chit chat in Urdu and Hindi. It was the title of an exhibition by Polly&me, a group working on an embroidery project involving women in Chitral, in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. The results of their workshops were displayed in Islamabad and Karachi, where half of the works were sold. The creative processes which produced these works were aligned closely with the grain of everyday existence. These simple pleasures of daily life shine brightly against the dark clouds of global tension associated with this corner of the world.

Polly&me was developed by Cath Braid, an Australian who originally started work in northern Pakistan with Kirsten Ainsworth as part of the clothing label Caravana, which featured in Smartworks. Cath has been working in Chitral since 2003. The town is in the north-west frontier of Pakistan, near Afghanistan, and lies nested within the mountain range of the Hindu Kush. Populated by the Kho people, fond of playing polo, the region is synonymous with fundamentalist terrorism in the Western mind.
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Cath has been working with the AKRSP (Aga Khan Rural Support Program) to assist women’s development. Her work in Chitral was assisted by Rolla Khadduri, a Lebanese woman, who has been working in Pakistan for four years. For Rolla, this project is ‘an opportunity to give women the space to tell their own stories’. Rolla worked with Cath
on running the workshops, probing the women about their stories, and recording their tales to appear at the back of each textile.

Cath has been working with 30 mostly unmarried women in particular. She begins with story-telling, dealing with everyday themes such as family life. They explore the graphic world around them, particularly in packaging of products from the market. Their creative exercises include making a collage of photographs of children. These them form the basis of the embroideries.

The subject of their embroideries included everyday play, such as Eikonchekek, the egg fighting game during Eid, the mother-daughter relationship and children’s names. At the same time as they explored freely their lives, these women were quite proud of their isolation (or protection) from the outside world through purdah.

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Eikonchekek reflects the play during the feast of Eid when children go into battle with eggs. The story depicts a young boy who would boil his eggs so that they could withstand assault.

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Games with Didi was created by Haseena, a 23 year-old unmarried woman. It depicts the riotous play between children, including Didi sitting in the tub usually reserved for washing dishes. Haseena talks about the experience of making this work:

During the workshops I used to go home with a certain joy in my heart from my work, I had become workaholic, and was not even aware of the time as we used to be so deeply involved in our work, it was fun, the practicality like practically first doing the task before going into the designing part was just wonderful.

Haseena particularly liked the exercise of drawing without looking at the paper. She was pleased to travel to Islamabad for the exhibition – ‘my childhood adventure was known to the world’ – and will be depositing money from the sale in a savings account with her bank.

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The work Sultan the Sitar-Player depicts a famous musician who performs historic songs of political opposition in Farsi. He is accompanied by a jerry-can. It was created by Naseema, Shehria and Saba. From one of his songs:

People don’t know who I am mad after,
They don’t know what is in my heart,
Those who are in love know this pain,
Oh, queen of beauty,
I want your beauty’s charity,
Like a beggar I have come
For only I deserve your beauty’s charity,
Even my heart has stopped functioning.

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Pot Swap was created by Zaibunissa, a mother of three. According to Zaibunissa:

Obviously it represents my house. I was so surprised to see my kitchen in the piece. My children helped me a lot on the piece and that gave a more personal touch to the piece as all my family got very emotionally attached with. That gave me very soothing and satisfying feelings.

This work was purchased by the Executive Director, The US Educational Foundation in Pakistan. Zaibun says that she will use the money to support her son’s education, ‘because for the admission of my son in a good college I’ll be needing that money as today’s inflation era people mostly hesitate in giving loan or lending money.’

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Mehndi was created by nine women, including Musarat, a 13 year old girl. At the exhibition opening, Mehndi was interviewed by Aaj TV, which greatly impressed her family back in Chitral: ‘I had never before in my life faced a TV camera and they were saying that they felt really proud that among all the other girls I was chosen for an interview.’ Mehndi now wants to take on the role of Cath and Rolla and teach others herself, but according to her friend Nasreen, ‘in Chitrali Nang Kizibiko Lo, You have to come out of age for all this you are too young to even think of such a thing.’

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Each textile work has its corresponding narrative sewn onto its back. To broaden involvement with the community, button pieces have been developed that women embroider with the names of male relatives and prayers. 250 women became involved in this.

Gup Shup is a landmark collaboration. Rather than seeking to preserve craft in its pure traditional form, this project introduces creative strategies to develop new images that seem true to the lives of their makers. But what seems most striking about his project is the sheer quality of the work itself, both in its craftsmanship and deft arrangement of ordinary elements.

This project seems quite transparent about the experience of the women it is meant to support. Apart for the creative challenges that they enjoyed, there seemed also benefits in the money and recognition that their work brings. But the meaning of this project is never complete. We watch with great interest to see how the women continue this momentum, and whether young girls like Musarat eventually start initiating project themselves.

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Games with Didi and Sultan the Sitar Player will be on display with the World of Small Things exhibition. There will also be bags embroidered made by the women for sale in the Craft Victoria show. Proceeds from the work go directly to the women who made them.

For more information about the project, please visit their extensive website:

Thanks to Ange Braid and Grace Cochrane for their assistance.

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Karl Millard – made in India, sold in India

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Patchwork pepper grinder

Patchwork pepper grinder

Karl Millard, Patchwork pepper grinder 2001, Sterling silver, brass, bronze, gilding metal, monel, copper. Grinding mechanism: Peugeot stainless steel cast and fabricated

Karl Millard is a Melbourne metalsmith whose work has gained high profile, particularly in the Transformations exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. He has mastered a particular method of combining metals in a patchwork pattern that is quite unique and highly regarded. As part of his interest in artisanship, he has also travelled to India where he resided in Tamil Naidu village specialising in metal casting.

Last year he was invited by the Indian silverware company Ravissant to design and make prototypes for silver tea sets. Ravissant was established in 1992 after regular visits by a Dutch silversmith developed a local industry in this medium. One of their designers saw Karl’s work on display at an exhibition of RMIT metal that travelled to the Australian High Commission in Delhi. Karl’s ‘multi-metal’ technique appealed to their interest in colour and pattern.

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Technical drawing of water jug

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Two Ravissant workers developing a mock-up
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The mock-up ready for inspection

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All hands on the bench, ready to fill orders

So they invited Karl to spend four weeks at their factory where he would design new tea sets. When Karl arrived, they were in the process of setting up their own casting and enamel departments. Karl found them very easy to work with, ‘You can realise a piece from a drawing quickly. It takes only four days to go from drawing to mock-up in metal.’ It was up to Karl to produce technical drawings for each of the designs that would enable them to be made on commission whenever required.

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The silver and ebony tea pot that will be display in the World of Small Things.
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The ebony handle insert was unusual for Karl, who had never used wood before. But there needed to be heat protection for the hand, and Ravissant had a policy never to use plastic. Karl was also impressed by the way their casting was based on a non-central axis, which contrasted with the Western value of symmetry. He enjoyed making more fluid forms. That’s something he take more advantage of next time.

According to Karl:

The culture of metal in India is so strong. The use of metal in tea pots is like our ceramic teapot here. Their silver tea pots are about everyday use, not about hiding it away in a cupboard. They buy it as a family gift: older people buy a set for daughter or son who is about to be married, or New Year’s Day gift giving.

The growing Indian middle class market provides Karl with an opportunity to make work at a scale and quality he’d rarely find in Australia. Here, his classic pepper grinders are sold only as works of art, for collections rather than use. At Ravissant, they have 122 silversmiths at work, who are able to turn an order for a whole tea set around in a week. For Karl, ‘it’s not based on supermarket or fashion cycle where you have to make 2,000 to make it work.’

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Karl’s work represents a new cycle for craft and design in Australia. Rather than a designer commissioning handmade product in a poor country for Western consumption, an Indian company buys the designs themselves, makes them with craft labour, and then sells them to their own middle class. Here’s an opportunity in Australia for seeing our own talent realised, albeit by someone else.

Karl’s work is part of the World of Small Things exhibition

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Timor-Leste – A king’s granddaughter helps re-weave a nation

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The following text is from Sara Niner, courtesy of the Alola Foundation:

Luirai Dom Alexio Corte Real of Ainaro and WWII hero (Centre) with Local Chiefs and Antonio Magno (far right). Aileu, Portuguese Timor 1938

The back-strap loom common to Timor and surrounding islands was brought down by migrants from the Bronze-age Dongson culture in mainland South-east Asia around 500BC. Today, geometric Dongson patterning and designs from Indian cloth traded by Arabs and Europeans for slaves and spices in Timor in the second century are mixed with motifs from indigenous myth and lore such as boats and crocodiles representing the original ancestors’ journeys to the islands. Local ceremonies and rituals of birth, marriage and death employ exchange of such cloth to bind together and integrate the worlds of the living and the spirits, expressing a desire for union and balance between the two worlds. Cloth is the physical embodiment of femaleness and, as sacred Lulik objects and heirlooms, they possess special powers.

Partially completed weaving on backstrap loom from Timor-Leste. Loom design by Ofelia Neves Napoleao

The motif here is a floral design from Portugal—the colonisers of Timor from the 16th Century until the Indonesian invasion of 1975. The designer Ofelia Neves Napoleao is the child of a Portuguese father and a Timorese mother who was the daughter of the Luirai or local king of Ainaro, Antonio Magno. In the feudal-style society of Ofelia’s childhood, Luirai families constituted the upper class ruling over a common farming people and below that, a caste of slaves. In the wet season she watched her royal grandmother, Antonieta Varradas Magno, prepare the cotton, and tie it off with palm leaves for dyeing and then in the dry season, dye and weave the finished cloth. Ofelia also learnt patterns from her fiancé’s royal family, the Napoleaos, of Oecussi, the old Portuguese enclave resting inside Dutch, now Indonesian West Timor. As the eldest grandchild of the last Luirai of Ainaro, Ofelia is accorded a certain respect and status in Timor.

Luirai Dom Alexio Corte Real of Ainaro and WWII hero (Centre) with Local Chiefs and Antonio Magno (far right). Aileu, Portuguese Timor 1938

These old royal elites were close to their Portuguese colonisers and, like Ofelia, spoke Portuguese. Led by Prince Henry the Navigator, Portuguese colonialism was rooted in the glorious beginnings of the ‘Age of Discovery’ when the Portuguese set out to explore the rest of the world reclaiming millions of lost native souls for the Catholic faith while growing rich on trade and conquests. Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the Spice Islands of which Timor was part early in the 16th century and Timorese myth characterized them as younger brothers, recalled to Timor by the elders of the mountains to rule in worldly affairs.

Ofelia Neves Napoleao buying cloth at Oecussi, 2008

On the day of the bloody Indonesian invasion in 1975 Ofelia was a young woman forced to run zigzag across their courtyard with her little brothers to dodge bullet sprays. Fleeing the Indonesian occupation she followed her Oecussi fiancé to Perth, spending 20 years there trying to help her family in Timor, raising two sons and becoming a skilled craftswoman. After the destruction of the final Indonesian withdrawal in 1999, she returned and found her place helping local women rebuild their lives by running weaving and craft programs. She now works with the Alola Foundation managing the Taibesse Sewing Centre, in a hot and cavernous shed, part of an old Portuguese Army barracks, overseeing 25 staff sewing handbags from the hand-woven cloth. She visits weavers in the countryside and buys cloth according to the principles of fair-trade. In 2008 she prepared this loom for a Melbourne Exhibition to demonstrate the intricacy and skill of the weaving process.

Sara Niner has been researching the life of East Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao for ten years and will publish his biography this year. She visited East Timor as a backpacker in August 1991 and the country and its struggle has become a big part of her life since then. Travelling around the island in 2000-1 searching out sites of significance in Gusmao’s life she found the land beautiful and solemn and beginning to soften after the immense raw devastation of 1999. She also saw how utterly exhausted the people were and the enormity of the task ahead for them and the agonising frustrating slowness of reconstruction. Yet after one trip far into the east of the country she wrote:

I was filled with euphoria and hope after a rich and emotional day of communication with people of vastly different experience that made it seem as if all things might be possible.

She has worked with the textiles and the weavers since that time to put on exhibitions, research and write about the craft and assist with a program of craft development and economic empowerment.

I feel that this half finished weaving embodies the new country of Timor-Leste where the task of rebuilding continues. Hope prevails but is often hard to sustain in the difficult post-war environment where violence and poverty mean hard lives for many women and men. Yet people continue to struggle everyday working to care for their families and communities and revive their culture.

For more information, download this document.

Sara Niner at work (second from left) with sewing co-op Metinaro IDP camp, 2008

Sara Niner has been researching the life of East Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao for ten years and will publish his biography this year. In 2003 she produced a travelling show Weaving Women’s Stories which promoted East Timorese tais, showing the strength and beauty of this traditional weaving . She now works with the Alola Foundation and is an instructional designer with the Ministry of Finance, Timor-Leste Government (RDTL). She is also completing a research project Strong Cloth in Timor-Leste: Women’s Craft and Development at Monash University.
The loom and products can be seen on display in the World of Small Things, Craft Victoria, 18 June – 27 July 2009.

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Afsaneh Modiramani – nomadic life in the city

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Afsaneh Modiramani

Afsaneh Modiramani

Afsaneh Modiramani at the loom

I am fascinated by textiles as a whole. I take great pleasure in weave, patterns and the use of colour. It is a privilege to be involved in one of the original expressions of art in human civilization. I seek to create contemporary pieces using those very traditional concepts and images. I have participated in number of local and international textile group exhibitions.
Afsaneh Modiramani – 2009

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Afsaneh Modiramani is an Iranian weaver who draws on traditional motifs from nomadic peoples in her region. She was first introduced to weaving seventeen years ago by Leila Samari, who now teaches loom weaving and textile design at Tehran University of art and runs the Haft Samar gallery. Afsaneh learnt weaving at Pardis University in Isfahan.

Afsaneh’s BA thesis was on equestrian textile accessories used traditionally by Iranian nomadic tribes. She was supervised by Parviz Tanavoli, a renowned Iranian sculptor and author of key reference books, including Shahsavan, Gabbeh, and Bread and Salt. From Parviz, she learnt about the nomad’s use of colour and traditional Iranian motifs. She has incorporated the lion, the evergreen tree and the shrub into her loom-made textiles. The lion which has a long precedent in Iran’s culture and for years was the emblem of Iran’s national flag backed by the sign of sun.

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As part of her BA thesis on ‘horse cover weaving’, Afsaneh travelled to the mountains to find nomadic peoples. She visited Bakhtiyari, Qashqa`i and Turkoman nomads, spread across central, southern and northern Iran. The Persian name for ‘horse cover weaving’ is “Jol” and it is used as a decorative piece placed under the horse saddle. She found that they had changed and the young nomad generation has gradually forgotten the traditional motives and use of colours and has resorted to weaving simple non-traditional pieces.

Afsaneh is also interested in the ‘paisley’ design, which was first woven in Kashmir around 11th century and then was brought to Iran, Russia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 15th century Iran, the name was changed from Sanskrit to the Iranian name ‘Shawl’ and eventually ‘Shawl Termeh.’ As Afsaneh says ‘I am very interested in pastry motives, shiny brocades and nomadic motives and using my imagination I combine them with colourful warp and weft which has been chosen very carefully’. Her work features the motif of the lion that is characteristic of the nomadic designs.

For the past eleven years, Afsaneh was working as manager for the design at Mahestan carpet company. She is now devoted full time to her own weaving.

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Afsaneh does not pretend to belong to the class of nomads who are the inspiration for her weaving. Would we look at this differently if it was woven by a Western artist?

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Sara Thorn – handmade in Indian cities

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Individual designers have been travelling to traditional craft communities for decades in order to develop product using the skills they so admire. But as more rural villagers move to the city, there is a fear that these skills will vanish. However, there are signs that they are re-appearing in urban workshops and factories. Sara Thorn is a Melbourne-based designer who has discovered ways of working with these new urban-based artisans.

Sara had previously worked with traditional artisans in a number of countries, including Vietnam, Sawarak and India. In 1980s, she established the popular Abyss Studio and Funkessentials labels and Galaxy retail store in Melbourne. In the late 1990s she moved to Paris, where she designed textiles for Christian Lacroix and Michiko Koshino, and Bella Freud in London. Sara was awarded the Winston Churchill Fellowship in 2001 to study jacquard silk weaving at the Lisio Foundation in Italy. As part of the project, Rubelli wove her fabrics. She was Curator of Design at Museum Victoria during 2004. Sara exhibits regularly and her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Powerhouse Museum, Australia.

Sara has recently teamed up with architect Piero Paolo Gesualdi to create the new WorldWeave enterprise. WorldWeave embraces the fusion of Ancient and Modern—honouring age old traditions and skills and working with new technologies pioneered by Indian ingenuity to extend traditions in a contemporary way.

Their first collection includes hand embroidered cushions, hand screen printed jute rugs, Australian Merino Virgin wool throws and scarves—all produced in India. Sara took artwork to India, specifically the North of India, Delhi and Amritsar in the Punjab and researched finding makers to work with and execute the ideas. Initially the idea was to focus on hand weaving. However, on spending several months in India researching potential makers, Sara was surprised to find businesses which had merged the lines between artisanal and contemporary traditions. They allowed her to create designs which honour hand traditions but also use state of the art international textile technology. Generally these were small textile, home furnishing businesses already exporting internationally.

Whilst developing the new collection within India’s contemporary textile industry Sara discovered a complex state of affairs where hand skills, new interpretations of traditions, ingenuity and an undying passion for and knowledge of textile production prevailed side by side. This encouraged Sara to work with techniques that were challenging and innovative which allowed her ideas to take forms beyond her original concepts.

Consequently the pieces in the exhibition are products of this ancient modern fusion.

The Acrobat cushion and Mermaid cushion-Ari embroidery on wool felt

Sara Thorn cushion

Sara Thorn cushion

Sara’s designs for these cushions were influenced by Egyptian circus tattoos and Indonesian tattoos. Sara was inspired to translate body decoration into the format of textile that could decorate a space and be useful as well as decorative.

These cushions were embroidered in Delhi by a Kashmir company who have adapted the hand Ari embroidery technique to a machine Ari embroidery stitch done on a sewing machine. Technically the embroidery is neither hand nor automated machine, as each piece is guided by hand and interpreted by the embroiderer through the machine, ensuring each piece is different.

The Acrobat hand silk screen printed jute rug

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This rug extends the Acrobat design into a rug format. Again it combines a combination of hand skills and technology. In the first instance the design was created in Photoshop, blown up and hand silk screen printed onto computer loomed natural jute. The company is based in Delhi, the Indian business centre but the actual rug is produced in the South of India utilising the rug making traditions of the South.

Taken crudely, Sara’s work in India evokes the way factories in China have been used to outsource textile manufacture. Yet for Sara, the conditions in the Indian factories are sympathetic to the handmade that she so values. Are the new urban craft factories able to sustain the handmade traditions that might otherwise whither when isolated in villages? Can we admire the traditional craft skills even when the designs are foreign?

Sara Thorn’s new WorldWeave collection puts her once again at the frontier of world craft design.

Thanks to Sara Thorn for the text and images.

· www.worldweave.com.au

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Embroidering survival in Palestinian refugee camps

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Though you might lose the world around you, you still have your hands. The Palestinian refugees have been living in refugee camps for almost sixty years. Women maintain their culture partly through embroidery. Luckily, there’s an organisation that can assist in helping their work find a market. For a modest price, you can obtain not only a beautiful object of use, but also a message of survival.

Inaash was founded and registered in Lebanon since 1969 as a non-governmental organization by a devoted group of Lebanese and Palestinian ladies motivated by their deep concerns for the deprived families in the camps. Over the years Inaash has trained around 2000 women up to a professional level.

Inaash aims to preserve and promote traditional Palestinian embroidery, and create jobs for women in the camps thus helping them to be economically independent. The embroidered items are made by Palestinian refugee women who were expelled from Palestine after Israeli occupation of their country in 1948. They moved to Lebanon and settled in camps. Some of them knew how to embroider: as young daughters they grew up watching their mothers. Others were taught how to embroider by the Inaash art committee.

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Embroidery is a traditional craft practice for Palestinians. Designs are passed on from mother to daughter, each generation changing a little and adding new inspirations. The repertoire is constantly changing and evolving. It varies from place to place in Palestine. Inspiration for patterns came from uniforms, creamies, printed fabrics, architectural motifs and nature.

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Many names of designs come from village life and are symbols of certain concepts, such as eternity and wealth. There are more than 200 floral and geometric motifs passed on from one generation to another. Many objects were embroidered, including cushions, runners, dresses—some for daily wear and others for special occasions like weddings. Embroidery dresses are not only beautiful but also told stories. Women chose what statements their clothes should make. Some lavish embroidered dresses have over 200, 000 cross-stitches.

The art committee of Inaash prepares the design, colors and provides the ladies in the camps with the raw materials needed (canvas, threads, silk). Women are paid by piece, finish the product and sell it. Inaash is hoping to develop its program by cooperation with volunteer fashion designers to bring in new ideas and by expanding the marketing of its products.

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The story of Samar, who embroidered the tea cosy for the World of Small Things:

My name is Samar. I am 50 years old. A mother for four children. I am from Java in Palestine. My family came to south of Lebanon after the Israeli occupied our country in 1948. My grandmother managed to save some of her beautiful traditional embroidered dresses and brought them with her. They were the most valuable things she ever had! I grew up in Rushdie camp watching my mother and her friends. Embroidering is an identity, it is our identity. It is part of my life not only to support my family financially but also feel proud participating in preserving our traditional heritage. In the afternoons, my kids study on their own and I socialize with my friends each having an item to embroider. If and only if those items can speak… they will tell you all the stories of the neighborhood!

I enjoy distributing colors and deciding what to put and where. It needs creativity. The most enjoyable moment is when I look at my finished lovely work! I do it with love that is why it is always wonderful! This tea cozy took me 120 hours (on average) I used DMC threads. My challenge for you is to count the number of cross-stitches! This tea cozy should only be enjoyed by people who appreciated hand work.

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One of Samar’s tea cosies.

Thanks to Souad Amin for the material for this post. Souad works with the Association for the Development of Palestinian Camps (Inaash) where she develops products made by Palestinian refugees living in camps in southern Lebanon.

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Fulidai-dai – another way of thinking about craft

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Deb Salvagno works for the East Timor Women’s Association, which runs tours of the Lautem district in East Timor, where traditional weaving flourishes. They also are involved in broader community development including health and education. Here she answers questions about the nature of this exchange between those inside and outside East Timor. It’s particularly interesting to read her reflection on fulidai-dai, the local gift economy that supports the transmission of craft skills.

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What do you think is special about the craft produced in the Lautem district of East Timor?

The predominant craft medium we work with is traditional hand-woven cloth known as tais. All over the island of East Timor, tais are signifiers of ethnicity, and designs are specific to language groups. They contain motifs that are a symbolic dialogue of diverse cultural practices. Even when the motifs cannot be associated to culture, they usually represent something more than decoration. The women we work with live in remote communities in the south east corner of the island; in the flatlands of Los Palos and the densely forested highlands of Iliomar. Los Palos is home to the Fataluku people. Tais woven by weavers in this community utilise futus (ikat) dyeing methods to express their ancestral heritage. Fataluku tais are revered and valued highly in traditional exchange. In Iliomar, weavers from the Makalero people use a combination of floating warp techniques to create rows of a unique and dainty floral motif. Usually presented in white on red or brown back cloth, these motifs have their origins in colonial exchange with the Portuguese who first came to East Timor in the middle ages. Iliomar weavers also utilise futus dyeing methods, however the European inspired floral motif is unique to this area of East Timor. Fataluku tais are more valuable locally than the Iliomar tais as the relationship between these two communities are steeped in ancient pacts and power relations.

Learning about the anthropology of cloth consumption and how the consolidation of social relations and specific cultural values are expressed through tais has been an amazing learning journey for me personally. By the commercial application of the traditional skills used to create tais, the women we work with hope to safeguard their traditions while simultaneously easing the disadvantages of poverty; this area of this craft practice is extraordinary and presents great potential.

Do they need help? What kind and why?

Product design and quality control are two one of the many areas where artisans in East Timor need our assistance. As cloth is created for tradition rather than for markets, product should integrate and balance both the cultural distinctiveness of the cloth and commercial application of the women’s skills. ETWA works with the Cooperative for Tais and Cultural Development (CTCD), which has 86 female members drawn from three weaving collectives in Iliomar and Los Palos. These women come from the poorest and most disadvantaged families in the region; approximately 25% of female members were widowed during the Indonesian occupation, literacy is low and many members have limited access to farmlands. The coop is attempting to deal with the challenges presented by independence- and the challenges are many. The cost of everything is rising; imported cotton has risen by approximately 150% in the past twelve months. Many women are desperate for cash so they underprice their weavings and often they’re losing money as well as hours of back-breaking work. Clearly this is making them poorer, so it’s not surprising that paying for life’s necessities is a major challenge.

While income is generated through weaving tais and transforming it into soft fashion accessories such as bags, as one south-east Asia’s least developed countries, the design and quality of their finished product is low-grade. Developing international markets is vital as the domestic market for weavings is inadequate, however, until product design and quality improves, prospects for increasing market share are minimal. The back strap weaving technique also produces textiles that are as varied and unique as the women who produce them, so improving consistency of output is important. The imported cotton yarn available in East Timor is intended for commercial use and the colour range and quality are substandard. We are hoping that with assistance from the Australian design community, we can support the communities in Iliomar and Los Palos to begin growing high grade cotton locally and thereby replace the need for imported cotton. Through this process, we will increase local cash flows, improve product quality and help artisans to maintain their dyeing traditions as the colours of traditional tais are exquisite. As we take a holistic approach to our work, we are also looking to improve the women’s health and will undertake research in June this year. We’re excited about the possibilities this will open for the weavers.

 

Can they help us? Can you explain what Fulidai-dai is?

 

CTCD’s organisational model is based on the cultural notion of Fulidai-dai; a concept unique to the Makalero people of Iliomar. It is a set of cultural norms that govern relationships towards reciprocity, mutual exchange and collective support. The practice of Fulidai-dai encourages cooperation and puts the focus on supporting one another rather than encouraging individualism and competition. Through Fulidai-dai, groups work in reciprocity for the greater good of their community, such as working together in the fields, building houses, looking after children or caring for community members when they are sick. The notion of Fulidai-dai also encourages the passing on of wisdom, so when women share their knowledge of traditional arts with younger women, they are practicing Fulidai-dai; it ensures that cross-generational and cross- gender cooperation and sharing occurs.

By integrating the notion of Fulidai-dai which encourages collective decision making, common ownership, consultation and member participation, CTCD has developed a culturally appropriate business model. Unlike the state and privately-owned cooperatives that operated in East Timor during the Indonesian occupation, the principles of Fulidai-dai are similar to -yet run deeper than- the principles of International cooperatives.

In the west, many people feel we have lost the deep sense of connectedness and community that the people of East Timor share so there is much we can learn. Mutuality, cooperation, patience, loyalty and the essence of friendship are just a few of the ways of being that we can learn from the weavers in Iliomar. And of course the things we learn are equally as important as the gift of support we bring. Acknowledging Fulidai-dai as a legitimate and honourable practice rather than imposing a business model appropriate to our culture, is another way we can support the women to use cultural traditions to build new futures for their communities. If inclined, we can bring these notions back to Australia to help regenerate community here.

Where would you like to see the partnership between them and us continue in the future?

In East Timorese society, the practice of giving and exchanging helps to maintain harmony within communities. If we perceive our work with CTCD in this light, we acknowledge that we both give and receive and we recognize that when two cultures join together in recognition of what each can bring to the other, endless possibilities are created. We aim that our partnerships continue this way on a road towards empowerment for both the East Timorese women we work with and for our members and supporters in Australia. Our annual weaving tour is an example of this. The tour gives participants an opportunity to learn about traditional weaving and dyeing through a series of participatory workshops and East Timorese weavers receive an opportunity to express their craft.

On a more practical level, we aim to work with communities to build a central space for research, design, product development and training and a place of mutual exchange where the International design community can exchange skills with East Timorese artisans in Lautem. We recognize that what we as Australian women bring to the relationship is access to resources and to markets to help give CTCD members access to the things they need to improve their quality of life.

Deb Salvagno has a background in the rag trade and has a BA in Community Development. She has worked in East Timor since 2003 and is a volunteer with East Timor Women Australia.