The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust of Australia

Pattern and Place

Report by Ilka White 2000 Churchill Fellowship To observe and learn from craftspeople practicing traditional weaving methods Indonesia, Nepal, Bhutan, India

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Name: Address: Phone: Position:

ILKA JANE WHITE 21 Smith St. Thornbury VIC. 3071 (03) 94849993 Studio based Weaver and Textile Designer Sessional Teacher, Textile Design. R.M.I.T. University

PROJECT DESCRIPTION I visited weaving communities in Indonesia, Nepal, India and Bhutan, observing and learning from weavers producing traditional textiles. I studied the weaving techniques of these regions with an emphasis on patterning using supplementary weft threads, and learned about the role weaving plays in the identity of these communities. HIGHLIGHTS • Living with Bapak Supardi’s family in Sukarara, Lombok. A village known for it’s weaving. Learning to weave Songket cloth on a back strap loom with lovely teachers Ani, Nana, Siri and interpreter Amin. • Watching women weave rugs at the Tibetan Camp, outside Kathmandu. A inspiringly co-operative, productive, almost meditative environment. • Walking to Khoma village in Eastern Bhutan to meet weavers of Kushutara brocade. Watching the weaving and learning about this most exquisite textile. • Discovering the use of a small frame to record weaving motifs and to prepare pattern lifting threads in Assam state, north-east India. Once I arrived in Varanasi this led to a further understanding of loom technology for patterned weaving in northern India prior to the use of Jacquard looms. • Revelling in the astonishing collection of textiles at the Crafts Museum in Delhi. The techniques, variety, genius, inspiration. The sheer art. • Looking through tribal textiles in the resource room at Kala Raksha, a centre for preservation of traditional arts near Bhuj, Western India. LESSONS AND CONCLUSIONS I need to: • Make textiles that reflect my place. • Push my art out into my life more. • Work without thinking too much! • Build on what I already do well. I can best disseminate by: • Teaching, giving talks, and facilitating a textile study group. • Curating an exhibition of collected textiles, compiling a Power Point presentation and CD Rom which record my fellowship journey. • Writing articles about the trip for magazine publication. • Exhibiting textiles of my own, inspired by my trip.

PROGRAM

Indonesia Java. Yogyakarta Realia Language School. Jadin Craft Textile Studio, Borneo Gallery, Lombok. Mataram Museum Negeri NusaTenggara Barat Rinjani Hand Woven and Selamat Riady Sukarara Stagen Hand Woven Home and workspaces Pringgasela Inkra Tanak Gadang

Dra. Dyah Prasetyo Hening Director: Jadin C. Djamaludin Proprietor: Rudy Tanjung (Museum of Western Nusa Tenggara) Director: R. Joko. Prayitno Guide and interpreter: Hubertus (Ikat factories) Weavers and dyers. Songket weaving supply. Assistant and interpreter : Amin Pak Supardi, Ibu Fatima and family. Teachers: Ani, Siti, Nana and Amin Trad. Sasak Weaving and natural dying. Owner: Syir’ah

Bali. from Ubud Village visits to Pejeng, Sideman, Klungkung, Gel Gel, Gianyar, Candidasa and Tenganan, Double Ikat weaver: Nyoman Diani

Java. Jakarta State Ministry of Tourism and Art National Museum Textile Museum Sumatra. Medan Museum of North Sumatra Pulau Samosir Tomok village Museum Huta Bolon Visits to weavers Tarutung Yayasan Diakonia Pelangi kasih Visits to weavers Sipirok Padang Bujur village Bukittinggi Pandai Sikat village Kubang and Payakumbuh Padang Museum Adhityawarman Palembang Zainal Songket Factory Thread Market

Assistant Deputy of Culture Heritage Development: Ibu Suwati Kartiwa Guide: Pak Turmuzi Advice: Gillian Green

Batak elder: Bapak Sidabutar Simanindo. Contact: Ousan Naibaho near Simanindo with guide: M. Arto Simbolon Nun with knowledge of Batak culture, Diakones: N.D. Gultom nearby Tarutung with Juliana Sidabutar Masdeliana Harahap showed me Ulos Sadun being woven from kapok fibre and beads. name translates as ‘clever craftsmen’ village. Weaver: Marina Adriani Director: Ibu Ita Fachril Drs. Zainal Arifin with Yeni

Nepal Kathmandu Valley Association of Craft Producers Luniva Craft Angora weaving N.A.R.E. Rabbit Producers Dhaka Weaves Bijaya Nepali Pashmina Udyog Dhankuta Sisters Handcrafts Tibetan Camp Dhaka Cloth workshop

Director: Neera Bhattarei Deepak Shrestha President: Sugat D. Manandhar Designer/Managers: Pratira and Rita Thapa Managing Director: Nima D. Sindan Mrs. Sumitra Bhujel Rug Weavers and Spinners Contacts of Nalini Shakyar

Bhutan Ta Dzong Museum Paro Guide: Tshering Tashi. (Yangphel travels) Government Handcraft Emporium Thimpu Wool weaving Centre Bumthang Khoma village. Lhuentse Kushutara brocade weavers: Yangchen Lhamo, Tenzin Wangmo and others. Ranjung village. Trashigang Natural dyer. Weaving School Khaling National Women’s Association of Bhutan

India Assam state Bodolands Baptist Mission Patki Juli village. Debhitola Weaving School Dhubri district. Assam Museum Guwahati Sualkuchi village. Silk weavers. Palashbari village. Endi silk.

Rev.’s wife and weaver: C. Lawmchungi Bodo weavers. Interpreter: Lal Chunungna Rabha weavers. Director: Charmi Guide: Joiti Workshop owner: Dilip Moral Mr. Balen Kumar. Guides: Taslim and Dek.

Mizoram state

Zohandco. Aizawl Mizoram State Museum Tribal Research Institute Mardin Handlooms Govt. Silk reeling factory Thenzawl township Zohandco. Thenzawl Champhai township Calcutta Crafts Council of West Bengal Indian Museum. Calcutta Weavers Service Centre Saltlake Museum Weavers Co-Op. Fulia Colony Varanasi Crafts Creation. Traditional Handloom Fabrics Weavers Service Centre Bharat Kala Bhawan Gallery, Banaras Hindu University Georgette Sari Weaver Ramnagar Brocade Weavers Delhi Crafts Museum Dilli Haat Handcraft Centre Sadar Bazar Wholesale Market

Asst. Manager: Lal him puii Kawilam Dept. of Art and Culture. Mr. Lal R Sailo Puan weavers. Mrs. B. Zo Dinpuii (Dini) Extension officer: K. C. Piana Emping basket weaver: Mr. B Lalhranga Handweaving project. Guide: Hmuna Zoloom weavers. Guide: Lal Rama President: Mrs. Ruby Pal Choudary Manager: Mr. Gosh. Dye Specialist: Ojit Tash Crafts Council. Guides: Haripada Basak and Indrajit Naskar National Awardee, Jala Master and brocade designer/weaver : M. Jafarali Asst. Director of Weaving: Ram Chandra Curator, Textiles and Decorative Arts: Ms. Yashodhara Agrawal Guide: Yashodhara Prop: Vijay Kumar Naqusha master: Sarfraj Ansari Director: Mr. Jyotindra Jain Prem Thread House: Ajay Sethi

National Museum Khadi Bhawan Government handloom outlet. Central Cottage Industries Emporium and State Emporiums. Jaipur City Palace Textile Collection Maharaja Sawai Mansingh 11 Museum Block Printing Workshops Sanganer township. Gitoo Patni’s workshop Block Print Designer Rajasthali Emporium Jodhpur Meherangarh ‘Majestic Fort’ Museum Village visits. Tribal Blanket and Dhurry rug weavers. Udaipur Folklore Museum Textile Merchants Ahmedabad Calico Museum of Textiles Art Director: Animesh Sen Gupta Honeycomb International Mr. Nazeer National Institute of Design Shreyas Folk Museum Patan Patolawala Double Ikat Patola Salvi Family Harilal Kuberdas Mashruwala Prop: Sureshbhai G Khatri Bhuj, Kutch Aina Mahal Museum Mr. Jethi Bhuj Folk Museum A. A. Wazir collector/trader Kutch Embroideries, other tribal textiles Kala Raksha Traditional Arts Mr. Prakash R Bhanani Bandhani Wala Ms. Aminabel Ismail Khatri Shrujan Threads of Life Bhujodi village Village visits to Dhordo, Nirona, Ludiya, Dhaneti, Tunda Vandh and others. Dhamadka Ajarakh Printers, Mr. Abdul Razzaque Mohammad Khatri Tamil Nadu state R.I.D.E. Kanchipuram Rural Institute for Development Education. Visits to Kanchi weavers R.I.D.E. Guide: Mrs Britto Upsana Studio. Auroville Designer: Uma Prajapati

MAIN BODY Pattern and Place. Jakarta, June 2000. Humid heat, banana palms, rubbish and constant horns. I am here on a Churchill Fellowship. I am without my language. I feel powerless and numb. Stripped of identity, personality, and assertion. I am realising how much of my sense of self is tied to my culture, my place and it’s languages; speech, gesture, thought patterns, allusions, education. I’ve never felt so alien before, so alone in a crowd. I spend two weeks at language school in Yogyakarta, learning bahasa Indonesia. Intense one on one tuition 6 hours a day. Very hard. A sensory and cerebral overload of foreign words and customs. Totally new language. I feel like I have to think with two heads. On the island of Lombok I stay with Bapak Supardi and his family in Sukarara, a village of Sasak people famous for it’s weaving. Every woman in the village weaves. On woven bamboo platforms, under palm thatch. Extraordinary sarongs covered in coloured motifs. Work related to this place, this culture.

Sasak is spoken here. My smattering of bahasa Indonesia is not much use and I am realising that even my work may not translate. Scarves in the tropics? Monochromatic, patched and felted wool? Perhaps in Australia, our ‘places’ are individualistic and internal? Does that make our art less legible to others? If we don’t use widely understood symbols, do we have a shared cultural literacy that allows others to read our work? Can we hope for understanding via the collective consciousness? Or is there a multi-cultural literacy? I spend a fortnight learning to use a back strap loom to understand how songket (supplementary weft) motifs are produced. On a mat for hours each day, legs out front, back straight, I struggle with the complexity of apparently straightforward techniques and the physical agony of the posture. My aches and mistakes cause great amusement for the entire village. I am surrounded by onlookers curious to see the foreigner. They reach across my warp to correct things, chat in Sasak about me and laugh. I resort to sign language, adjust to the lack of privacy and learn to laugh at myself. My teacher Ani holds in her mind the blueprints for scores of patterns she’s learned from her elders. For a few days I try translating just one motif to a graph, but sticky-taping sheets of paper together frustrates both of us so I abandon it. But that process has helped us understand one another’s thought. An example of cross cultural problem solving.

Comparisons between east and west are constant. I watch women weaving sarongs that take 3-4 months to complete. They wind a warp for only one sarong at a time. Their warping tool is fixed at that length. I ask my friend Amin, “why not wind for 2 or 3 sarongs to save time?” “I don’t know” he says “It’s tradition, we always do it that way.” Ani brings me a painted wooden bird which holds a pulley in it’s feet. It is part of the local loom. Suspended from the thatch, it guides a rope from a pattern stick to a weight. It is beautiful. The weight though, is a hook stuck in a margarine container and filled with concrete! Beauty is relative.

In Tenganan, Bali, I spend time with the gracious weaver Nyoman Diani. She teaches me about the making of Geringsing, the village’s famous double Ikat cloth. She shows me dye vats and waits patiently as I write things down. In Tomok village on Samosir Island, Central Sumatra I meet Bapak Sidabutar, a Batak elder. As his daughter Rita translates, I learn some of the ritual uses of Ulos, the cloth of the tribal Batak people. He then sends me to another daughter further south in Tarutung. Juli takes me to see the Batak method of exchanging the warp, an ingenious process I had puzzled over in my analysis of Ulos. As a foreigner, I am often laughed at when I say I am a weaver. People rarely believe me at first. Then even more disbelief when they learn I use a handloom!

Certainly my choice to be studio based in Australia rather than work within industry comes from a need to link myself closely with tradition and so feel part of something larger and older than myself. At the Tibetan camp just out of Kathmandu, I sit watching carpets grow in the weaving room. There is an atmosphere of peace in this co-operative environment. A big room full of looms. Women sit hammering, knotting, beating. Singing, swapping tools, chanting quiet mantras. I fall in love with old women with long plaits, striped woollen aprons and kindly creases around their eyes. Wide cheekbones and patient faith. Conversation ebbs and flows. I would like to work like this. In Eastern Bhutan I walk to Khoma village to meet weavers of Kushutara brocade. Ravine, suspension bridge, narrow path, village. I watch the weaving of this most exquisite textile, asking young and old women about the structure, the yarn, the dyes and the labour. I am inspired by the speed and no fuss work style of the Bhutanese. I learn about true hospitality. Bhutan is stark, clean and bracing. High misty passes eerily silent. Old prayer flags hang limply in the wet air. A road sign says ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’ And so it is.

So much generosity and goodwill, grace and awe. But there is dark and light in every cloth - and in the journey itself. I face health challenges, difficulties with language, climate, dodgy transport, telephone and mail strikes, unending red tape, infuriating bureaucracy, freedom fighters, border crossings, fear, loneliness, theft. I grapple with grief over inequities of wealth and fortune and with vast cultural differences that make understanding challenging from both sides.

Nowhere more so than India. Travelling from Gawahati to Aizawl on one of those horror hot, humid days with my clothes sticking to me and my hip pressed into the jeeps doorhandle for fifteen hours we round a bend and I look out over Bangladesh. From way below that steep road, to the curved horizon on three sides stretches an expanse of flat plain. A turtle shell of green land and blue water reflecting the sky. Not a cloud. As we travel, the sun shines from one flecked patch of water to another so that the surface of the earth seems polished. From our height, it’s all pattern. I recall Ursula Le Guin’s poem about artists, “what do they do, the singers...painters, shapers, makers... they go there with empty hands, into the gap between. They go into confusion and come back with patterns.” Every week a wealth in input. Temples of muslin and cane, frangipani, burning bodies, incense and cows. Rhaba women in Assam use extra shaft techniques that lead to breakthroughs in my understanding of Indian pattern making prior to Jacquard looms.

Outside Calcutta, refugees from Bangladesh work on pit looms. The walls of their homes and workshops are a patchwork of beaten mustard oil tins, coated in tar to stop the rust. The whole village is working on an order of scarves and dress fabric for a Japanese designer with bland taste. In Varanasi, famous for it’s exquisite brocades, Ram Chandra, patient and helpful, meets me at the weavers service centre and explains loom adaptation and weaving theory. He is

a born teacher, but my learning curve is so steep at times I feel completely out of my depth. My journal fills with diagrams. I visit the master brocade weaver and designer M. Jafarali, one of the last craftsmen to use the ancient Jala weaving system. In the Muslim quarter we watch the hand building of components and punch cards for Jacquard looms. At the Hindu University, the curator Yashodra is welcoming and we discuss tools and techniques, delighting in the wonder of old textiles together. I notice in myself the westerner’s romanticised view of the crafts and craftspeople of indigenous cultures. The assumption that every stage of their process is imbued with tradition and symbol, their work a meditation, the result always something approaching holy. But many of the weavers I meet don’t know, or don’t give conscious meaning to the symbols they are using. “what does this mean?” I asked Amin. “oh, that’s just decoration.” We in the West want our work to have connections with ideas, systems and presence beyond itself. We inject meaning into our craft, explain it, compare it, while the East barely speaks of it at all. It just is. Flying home, I look down on the pattern of the central desert while the Australian Girls choir sings ‘I am, you are, we are Australian’ on the in flight radio. Despite myself I’m weeping. A mixture of relief, guilt at our affluence, homesickness, and a love of that land down there. I have now an overwhelming desire to produce work about my own place. I have come home to ideas that began to germinate before I departed and I am embracing them like family at the airport.

With weavers in Mataram, Lombok

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS My Churchill Fellowship was even more challenging than I had thought it would be. For 7 months of extraordinary beauty and travail I lived every day with adrenalin pumping and all the challenge, confusion and emotion I experienced left no time for the luxury of processing. Even now I find I cannot hurry the ‘unloading’ of the trip. Cultures as old, as complex and as foreign to ours as these, are hard to make definitive statements about. It’s a very western thing to attempt. I know the experience has changed me, but struggle to even adequately describe here what it is I have learned. I have feared if I try too hard, I’ll lose it in the translation.

What I have returned with: Inspiration, modelling and mentoring from weavers. An experience of; -weaving as an expression of cultural identity. -communities happy to be weavers, proud of their work. A stronger knowledge base from which to teach. A collection of prints and slides to share in presentations. A wonderful fabric sample kit for aesthetic inspiration. A hundred stories to bring these textiles to life for students.

How I can best disseminate the information: Through my teaching of Weaving and Textile History. By giving talks and presentations to interest groups. Through the facilitation of a textile interest/study group. By curating an exhibition of collected textiles with accompanying notes and images which record my fellowship journey. By compiling a Power Point Disk and CD Rom record of the trip. *Much of the above I have already been able to undertake.

How I can improve my work in Australia now: •

By applying the practice of making textiles that reflect one’s place.

Almost everywhere I went, people were producing cloth that was unique to their culture and their place. This tradition was so strong that the art and culture were inseparable, and fed one another. I think textiles can help to cultivate community here in Australia. I am currently planning a series of textile works about the Native Victorian Grasslands, the original landscape of my neighbourhood. It will refer to both the urban and remnant natural landscape, celebrating this place and expressing my part in this local community.

•

By broadening my approach to my art form.

I left with the intention of looking at supplementary weft patterning in woven cloth, but I saw a lot more than that. I decided not to limit myself just to that technique but open my eyes to other beautiful textile modes as I came across them. These included warp patterning, dyeing and resist dyeing of thread or woven cloth, and surface design like embroidery and stitching. Already my work is drawing on those techniques as much as on straight weaving, and that has opened up many more design possibilities for me. •

By pushing my art out into my life more.

In the last five years I’ve been pretty exclusively driven by my weaving. The weavers I have met through my fellowship however are not obsessed with their work. Weaving is just a part of their lives, like washing clothes, sifting rice or decorating a camel. I’ve learned that I needn’t be so anxious about my work. Better to apply that ‘simply do it’ spirit, and remember that weaving is but one part of my life. I am now letting my creativity spill more often into the making of a gate or the planning of a lesson and it’s making my approach to weaving less ‘precious’ and more relaxed. •

By working without thinking too much!

It is a glorious thing to see a skilled craftsman at work. I watched weavers who threw their shuttles with apparent thoughtlessness. They were so quick, so practiced, so adept. No hesitation before they threw, no pause to admire after they beat. I think once the design is complete, this state of mind can produce good cloth. I will work to achieve this rhythm, and let go of constant analysis. Design and prepare the job, then do it...rather than mixing the two. •

By building on what I already do well.

The excellence of tribal textiles is partly due to the fact that they have been produced for so long. A daughter weaves as her mother did, with minor, if any change in design. She begins with something that’s already known to work beautifully and she masters it. Our art is always changing along with our culture. We are constantly innovating. I have tried something different with every new body of work, and sometimes even with each individual piece. I now realise that developing what you’re already good at is a much better starting point as it gives you the benefit of experience, requires less time and lets you master a technique.

What improvements should be made in Australia? - Traditional textiles should be part of all the curriculum in all textile design courses. Especially those of this region because it is valuable to know and understand our neighbours, and because they are inspirational. - We should respect our own Communities and Places, and encourage work which expresses and celebrates this. - Educational Institutions, Business, Government and Artists should co-operate and share their resources for everyone’s benefit.

Mizo loom fly shuttle mechanism

Mizo loom in use by Rhaba weavers in Assam