The biome of handmade textiles, Gujurat

Every agricultural society is also the story of textiles.

Where people stopped long enough to live and grow food, there is archaeological record of flax or early cotton varieties also being grown.

Households intercropped edible plants with plants that could be woven, and every home in all probability had a loom of some kind that cloth could be woven on. Backstrap looms for nomadic people, pit looms for those more settled, the wooden evidence is often lost in the past but the fragments of fabric found through the archeological and cultural records indicate looms in domestic settings for millennia.

Weaving was an everyday household activity pre-industrialisation.

Often in the women’s domain, as spinning, laying the warp and weaving were less dangerous than hunting, and working the land. Women could have a babe in a cot by the spindle, or keep an eye on toddlers as they grew. Children would learn on a toy loom. Older women had skills they passed on generationally. In some cultures, the loom became part of the myth. Greek myths talk of weaving songs that Cerces sang, readily identifying her activity in a way listeners to the stories of the Greek Gods would know.

Weavers in the high Himalayas of Ladakh, India, talk about the unending yarn representing their progeny, the weft the mother, the warp the father. They are weaving their family each time they create a shawl or a blanket, reiterating their family tree.

Creating their place in the world and weaving an identity.

The fundamental role of garments is to wrap the human body to protect it from the elements, keeping us protected from the environment. From baby blankets to shrouds, textiles are with us from the moment we are born to the moment we die. We have imbued cloth with religious, cultural, social and economic significance from society to society and culture to culture. The raw materials and styles may shift but the fundamental service a garment provides remains the same. Along the way cloth has found a niche in our households, replacing animal skins as soft furnishings for our modern caves. Linen sheets, chintz curtains.

Despite the Industrial Revolution changing the textile industry forever, the need to weave traditional designs on wooden looms has remained strong in India. As I’ve worked my way north and south, east and west, I am struck by how I almost always see a loom in rural villages.

Some of the raw materials may have changed but the designs continue, and the recognition that these are skills passed generationally.

“My father taught me”. “My grandmother shows me” . How often have I heard references to spinning and weaving that include family. These skills are recognised as inter-generational wealth.

I worry that the short attention spans created by our damaging social media will be the final unlocking of an activity that stretches back to our first knitting of strings and the need for a bag to carry food in.

I sincerely hope that taking small groups of interested people to see how handlooming works will be part of the influence on the next generation to weave economically, where responsible, respectful tourism has a force for economic good.

Losing our Ladakhi pashmina goat herders to the forces of Netflix might be something later regretted.

The language of life is woven through with terms that belong to textiles. In English we idiomatically use terms such as frayed or warped, I’ve lost the thread, blanketed with love, life’s rich tapestry. Without always recognising these are terms from our textile past. We can really say that textiles are woven into our past.

Not every region has the climate or soil to grow flax or cotton. Colder mountainous regions made use of animal wools to keep them warm. The biome provides the soil and the rainfall, the habitat for the beetles used to dye cloth and for the plants such as madder or indigo for reds and blues. Lichens, shells, insects, berries, leaves and bark all provide a natural biodiversity that humans explored for colour.

It’s my thinking that the more arid the environment, the brighter the weaving colours. Temperate climates often produce soft tones - think the heathers and greens of Harris Tweed. Gujurat, on the other hand, and Rajasthan, are more arid regions and the colours lean towards hot pinks and bright yellows. Now the product of modern dyes, these were once dyed from the local vegetation, but I often wonder if the dryer the climate the bigger the need for strong colours to offset the dry and the dusty. A cultural response to the characters of a biome. And the brighter light reflecting off the desert mica, intensifying the hues.

I’ve been reading about the history of the cotton industry and the shift from household to mono crop. Post industrialisation, I had not appreciated the extent to which cotton for the textiles industry shaped policy decisions on economic and political matters. I certainly had not read about the crisis India’s hand loom weavers found themselves in as the mills of Lancashire rose and how the hand weavers of India were forced into unemployment and starvation by appallingly low wages to reduce competition.

Visiting regions in India where handlooming is functioning economically feels to me like the closing of the circle. The Lancashire mills, long since defunct, have not stayed the pace. China’s capacity for production has allowed it to dominate the power loom textiles export market, with India close behind. The natural pace of handloom will always keep it small scale.

Strength comes from creating hubs and cooperatives, and allowing the artisans to shift with the market forces in terms of design.

Buyers from elsewhere need to be reminded that handmade is dependent on weather, the supply lines of raw material, and that new designs are interesting but take time to develop and iterate on the loom. Weavers need their own projects to keep them interested and growing creatively. Handmade cannot replicate the speed and volumes of machine made.

I’m very interested in the resurgence in old world cotton, and the ways in which old indigenous species are making a come-back. I’m hoping to see these growing for myself and talk to the farmers working with old drought-resistant strains.

In November 2024 I’m leading a textiles tour in Gujurat. This is a wonderful opportunity to meet the artisans directly and explore skills and techniques through workshops and demonstrations. Do join me in supporting the artisans directly.

---

“The Trees of India” - Chichester Open Studios 2024

A new body of work on the wall for Chichester Open Studios this weekend and next. Do tell your friends to drop by.

“The Trees of India” explores some of the relationships (political, religious, ecological, cultural) Indians have with their arboreal flora. Giclee printed limited editions on Hahnemuhle Hemp.

The Trees of India

Trees call to me. I am drawn to their daily stories through their trunks and bark, the angle of a leaf to the sun and wind, leaf bite patterns by marauding insects. I once stood in a plaza in Seville with a poet’s bust, and at each end of the municipal planting were two huge ficus trees planted in pairs well over a century ago. My husband raised an eyebrow and said ‘Listening?’ as he read aloud about the poet from his phone. I couldn’t take my eyes off the years of growth woven into the girth of these huge trees, and felt their living so strongly. It was as if they were pulsing energy at me. I left them reluctantly, dragging back to the poet, but the four sentries stay in my mind still. The planting done with intent, an urban planner distant in time recognising the necessity for urbanites of green and leaf. The juxtaposition of built and growing. The human need for green and living.

In Cal Flyn’s book ‘Islands of Abandonment’ she discusses Ingo Kowarik’s studies of abandoned post-war railway sidings in Germany. He writes a new framework expressing how we might examine and understand the significance of the patterns of re-growth in flora and fauna in these abandoned sites.

The framework notes four types of vegetation. First, remnants of what we might call pristine nature- undisputed sites, ancient woodland, valuable for their diverse and dense structures. Following this are cultural landscapes, where nature has been shaped and sculpted by farmers and foresters. Think of the sheep, grazing the West Sussex Downs. Or the water channels of Jodphur. Thirdly, ornamental planting of trees and plants, urban planning for aesthetic reasons. Our trees standing sentry in Seville, or the planting of the palm trees along Bombay’s green Maidan.

Finally, Kowarik writes of ‘nature of the fourth kind’: the spontaneous ecosystems that have grown up on wasteland, unsupported. The wastelands I’ve seen are not uninhabited but areas of urban decay, ecological rallying as unintended consequences of urban atrophy.

Peepul leaves, synonymous with temples, sacred groves, city trees and any tiny crack in the masonry.

This feral growth often happens in buildings where ownership is contested. In the heartland of Colaba, Bombay, is a section of building with the roots of a Ficus that wrap themselves around the front face of the structure. A fifty year old legal debate has left the building to the ravages of the monsoon and the humidity of the maritime climate, and unchecked, the tree has taken a firm grasp. To the extent that its roots are partially whitewashed as a nod to keeping it managed. The plant is feral and acts as a support system to the insects, mammals and reptiles living in its crevices and on its bark. Not quite abandoned as a site, the building offers refuge for the tree, and allows the tree to find its own way, the roots and building becoming one. Refugia for wildlife, as Flyn writes. Perhaps the human inhabitants of Colaba might think about the ecological virility of this almost-abandoned building. But it’s too risky: the ficus might uncurl an air root too ambitious, and the thoroughly modern, functional building next door will have to bat off its arboreal advances.

Further north from Colaba a tenement building sprouts another Ficus, its roots finding tenacious hold in the crumbling masonry of the fourth floor. Sharing its position with satellite dishes and illegal verandas, the tree is a subset of Ingo Kowarik’s fourth kind, a feral plant, definitely unsupported but living on a site not yet abandoned. The tenement is fiercely lived in, an urban shout, despite the monsoon’s best attempts to encourage black mould and the city’s pollution a second skin thick on the building. I’m left wondering if the occupants of the building might quite like their airborn tree, so high off the ground, surviving in the traffic vapour trails, an ecological third finger up to the establishment. In solidarity with the apartment dwellers surviving the everyday.

The specificity of the maiden. A broad reach of colonial grass (British grass species do not thrive in India but the homesick Brits loved their lawns) where afternoon cricket could be played, and the heat of the day diminished by the long line of coconut palm trees and its margin. Trees planted for inhabitants to enjoy. (The line of change hard written into the DNA of the architecture. Bombay-Gothic on one shore. Thirty years of structural engineering and backfilling the shoreline, to create the new coast of Art-Deco Bombay). The tropical trees perhaps reminding the city’s inhabitants that they were definitely in India, despite the architectural echoes of Whitehall. Although frankly, with the humidity and the heat and every crack in a wall or the pavement filled with constant growth and green living plant life, there would be little need for reminders.

Bombay still explodes with trees at every turn, although hugely at risk from infrastructural and urban development.

Flyn writes briefly of ‘the ghost of herbivory past’. I like this as an idea. Browsing animals leave ecological traces that reach forward in time, where soil is manure enriched, and there the browsers leave, the uneaten plants come to dominate. ‘A legacy of what comes before. It is a form, they say, of ecological memory’. In the early days of Mumbai’s history, the mangroves and the shoreline trees would have been species typical of those found on the Indian Ocean.

The palms along the Maiden rustling in the breeze are an ecological legacy of Mumbai’s maritime position and history. The British were dependent on maritime trading routes out of India, in the days of the Honourable Company, and Bombay was a big port. These palms, neatly planted and controlled in a green space central to Bombay’s identity, might remind us what came first. Might this be read as another green third finger up to the colonialists, who planted a species for shade and the sound of the breeze in the fronds, and instead grew living reminders of pre-colonial India. It’s an intellectual stretch of an argument, I know, let down by not knowing who planted the palm trees and when. But it is a possibility.

Moving westward to Gujurat and Kutch, the bent trunk tree I photographed here was a species I did not recognise. I was told it was a tree of Spanish origin, the seed thrown from the cargo doors of aeroplanes under Rajiv Gandhi’s re-forestation project of Gujurat. (I have yet to find details of this programme and research continues). These, then, are trees as political statements, supporting farmers needs for more forestry in habitat-depleted regions, encouraging the agricultural vote. We doubled back so I could photograph it, it’s odd bent trunk and bushy head standing out like a sore thumb. An ecological memorial to a political act.

In South India, the tree species changes. The Nilgiri Hills are a protected biosphere region I know well, and walking trails through Thekaddy I have seen fantastical trees trunks that curve to the sky, and drowned trees in the Periyar Reservoir testament to water management in the 1930s. The tea estates of the Nilgiris offer extraordinary vistas, and some of my favourite images are of the tea bushes like terrestrial coral formations, punctuated by tall Silver Oaks. This is very much a cultural landscape, the planting of tall Silver Oaks to stabilise soil and give shade to the intensively farmed tea bushes below.

Northwest to Rajasthan, in Jodphur, the Maharani (or queen) historically took responsibility for water management. No doubt another political move to encourage the dominated population to love their rulers, (and their queen) the water tanks and lakes are nonetheless testament to the public works she carried out. One of these is a rain gorge, the Hathi Nahar or elephant walk. A water catchment channel chiselled out in the 1500s where two types of rock strata existed. When the rains fell, water was channeled down the gorge into a rainwater lake designed to manage flow to hydrate the Brahmins of Jodphur through the dryer periods. Out of the monsoon one can now walk its high-walled path, lined with local species of acacia and other desert plants. The trees follow the gorge, and looking up one can see their branches high against the sky. This walk is a recent development, a desert biome walking trail that leads and educates people through its paths. India’s recent explosion in middle class tourism has pushed out new ways of being a tourist, with nature more celebrated. Native species are signboarded as drought resistant and therefore special. Ecological sensitivity comes with economic growth. The tourist gaze is shifting.

Forever and always, the role of the tree in the subcontinent as a transmitter of prayers and offerings stands strong. Every village has its temple, and at every temple stands a peepul tree, often festooned with red or orange fabric or tied with sacred thread. All blessed by the priest, purchased from the religious bits vendors lined along the road close by. Prayers are offered, cotton or chiffon is tied to the tree, which both takes the blessing and carries the prayer to the god(s). The tree is as significant as the religious finery it wears. I love these holy trees and have to stop to photograph them. Around the lake at Pushkar the trees have incense lit twice a day at their roots, a smoky prayer sent heavenward, both a thanks to the tree and a useful daily godward invocation.

Under the shade of India’s holy trees, villagers gossip, chai made and sold.

Holy trees are rarely cut, and some temple trees can be two or three centuries old. Trees that clean the air, are refugia for insects and reptiles stranded in urban environments, have vermilion blessings from their community of temple goers. These trees, holy by geographic proximity, are both protectors and protected.

The huge peepul trees in Colaba offer shade and protection. The trunk gives the barber somewhere to hang his mirror, or locals rest beneath their shade, phone calls carried out. These trees are more than just urban landscape design. They remind the Bombayites of their village roots, connecting people to nature, allowing cultural behaviour to shift from village to city with familiar landmarks. All over India I have seen walls built with tree branches given space to go through rather than cut. I’ve seen trees garlanded for festivals, threaded for luck, lit joss sticks stuck into the root trunks of the aerial ficus. I’ve walked in sacred groves and city parks from North to South, sat in the shade of village banyans.

This is a land that loves her trees.

This is also a land of new development, metro line building, housing construction. Old street trees are at risk right across Mumbai, and have been cut down in their thousands. Pockets of resistance have limited voice against the municipal authorities and wealthy developers. This is not the space for this discussion, but it needs the oxygen of publicity.

Nettle Anthotypes and Spring

The Spring Equinox is always a transitional period for me personally. While many people hunker down in the winter and enjoy the periods of darkness and cold, my African bones find it hard. I can’t wait for the hour to spring forward. I find the dark January hours a torture. Come April, projects swivel into focus and creative ideas become more intense. Perhaps I need the downtime of our dark northern winters and the seasonal travel towards spring to generate momentum. Watery walks around the Harbour connect me to my landscape, the trees and plants on the waters edge fine tuning my awareness of leaf growth and the turning of the seasons. In my internal world, winter walks have less intensive creative dialogues.

Robert MacFarlane writes about thought-movements, or ‘thought-ways’, “…ideas that have been brought into being by means of motion along a path’. He refers to Kierkegaard speculating that the mind might functionally optimally at the pedestrian pace of three miles an hour, and ‘Footfall as a way of seeing the landscape’. In Spring these thought-ways can be extremely intense moments, where ideas and projects roll in and crystallise with a clarity I cannot find in late winter. I find my creative path again having lost my way.

I’ve returned again to anthotypes. The timeframes and inconsistency appeals and is an antidote to the precision of photogravure. Phenolic Acid is found in most plants to varying extents and is part of the plant’s defence system against UV radiation. It functions as a defence mechanism against other aggressors (the pathogens, parasites and predators that plants need to defend themselves from). Phenolic acid contributes to the colour of the plants. Filtered out with a bit of help from alcohol, the phenols turn out to be light sensitive to UV. Which means we can make a light sensitive emulsion and expose the substrate to light. A camera-less camera. What I really love is the concept of closing the loop: nettle emulsion with a nettle leaf as the subject. Magnolia juice with a magnolia. You get the idea.

In my search for a practice that reminds us of our connection and stewardship of the natural world, finding a process with which to make images so simple and non-toxic feels celebratory. And Spring-like.

My nettle jus has had very long exposure times and is still making limited images. The green is very pretty though. I will have another go with perhaps more alcohol in the mix. It is not an exact science at the dimroom level. Phenolic acid in nettle jus depends on the plant, I imagine the terroir, the weather. I do not yet know if phenols rise and fall with the sap. I do know some plants are more phenolic than others. I’ve used both nettle leaves and a positive image to trial the system.

My next big purchase is a UV meter to measure how many units of UV impact how many coats of nettle emulsion. In the meantime, I’m eyeing plants in a different light. The connection to our growing environment and the dynamic characteristics of Anthotyopes are pointing me towards moon albums.

Where men and mountains meet, or of socks and sufi saints. On the trail of nomads and the journey of the pashmina shawl.

My apologies to John Keay. I first read his book in the early nineties, and have read it a good few times since. I have been thinking and reading about trade routes through the Himalayas and the role ponies played in trade, and I’ve been lucky enough to spot another moment where my interests collide. The production of pashmina shawls is supported by wool from goats in the mountains. When I’ve been reading about products “…such as wool” from the mountains was traded up and down on the backs of hardy ponies from the Spiti Valley, some of this was wool for pashminas. I can’t believe I haven’t twigged before. I thought it was any old wool. Or must have missed the connecting moment. An intersection of my interests where men and mountains meet.

The tour in November 2023 is a textiles trip, taking a good, long look at the artisan production of hand-crafted textiles in Gujurat, specifically around the textile hotspot of Bhuj. I’ve been leaning into reading and learning about how people make use of the resources around them in Bhuj, how environment influences colour and design, and how people have traded resources to create the textile they needed.

Which reminds me of a trip I took ten years ago to Ladakh, exploring the roles of little local Zhanskari ponies of the Himalaya in trading and trading routes. The porosity of the mountains that seem an impermeable barrier to those not living there. I skittled the kids along with me, and we went all the way out of Leh to meet the Changpa nomads herding goats on the Changpang Plateau, up at a breathtaking, heart stopping 4500 metres.

Before we go any further, I have to admit to a passion for handmade shawls that is wholly self serving.

I love the feel of hand woven, the irregularity in the perfection of hand made. I have traditional Himachal deep brown herringbone weave shawls with red geometric stripes in the weft at each end, bought over the years from my educator and friend in many things woven, Sita Ram in Manali. When Jack was born he sent me an exquisite cream baby shawl in a wool/angora mix, the product of German missionaries in the 19th century in Kullu. I have Sita Ram to thank for explaining, patiently, how the domestic looms in the villages scattered around Manali worked, and (over excellent ginger tea), met the many ladies that spin and knit for him.

I have a deep chocolate cashmere shawl, a sample from the heady days of the Negi-Warner Shawl Emporium that never quite happened for various reasons. A trip through Himachal Pradesh 12 years ago designing big shawls and working on colours was brilliantly educational. Amit Negi and his wife Jane-Anne and I had three children in tow as we felt fabrics and applied watercolour paint to design boards. I had the idea to add an ID mark to each of our shawls, allowing the wearer to go online and meet the weaver, and engage with the slow process of hand weaving. (Oddly a range of strikingly similar designs to ours appeared in the UK a year later which we never got to the bottom of. Shawl design industrial espionage).

The Itch, bought from the Pushkar camel mela, is a hand woven brown number from the spare fur of teenage camels, in a rich burnt caramel, and I have Akrajh, Banjari, hand blocked and tie-dyed, in cotton to silk, from Gujurat, Rajasthan, Calcutta. All hand woven, hand dyed, hand processed. All are precious.

I own Fab India wool shawls with Kullu designs, simple grey and black shawls bought from my textile guy in Jaipur, and the first shawl I bought in my early twenties in Bombay. Mis-sold as cashmere to my young uneducated eye, it is a simple duck egg blue with exquisite cream embroidery from Jammu and Kashmir. I can safely say it triggered the collection. I imported Himachali wool shawls embroidered in crewel, selling textiles with Trunk Sales from my farmhouse, and I’ve been in love with India’s shawls from the moment I landed in Bombay. Following the route of the pashmina shawl back to its raw material makes total sense to the geographer in me.

The mountains are the Zhanskari Range, a flight up from Delhi where the runway suddenly appears in a valley walled by massive mountains. A road trip 80km out of Leh to the east, overnight in a truck stop with beery truckers and a huge army officer worrying about our safety. The road pretty rough and in constant state of mend with JCB machinery, kept operational for the many military trucks winding their way to listening points on the high Indo-Chinese borders. And incredible views of unimagined landscape, punctuated by massive Buddhist monasteries. Oasis of wealth and patronage, religion, culture and art. From a Western perspective these huge monasteries feel they’re in the middle of nowhere. To Buddhists from the region, these monasteries are close to Buddha’s roots.

The other inhabitants of the dry desert in this part of Ladakh are the pastoral nomads. This term has a depth of academic research behind it examining settlement and ways society has evolved, delicious ways to spend time for a geographer. If agriculturalists live from domesticated plants, the pastoralist lives from domesticated animals. Smaller populations can be supported on animals than agriculture (the food chain/energy principle) so populations are thinner, often existing where there is low rainfall, poor soil and farming difficult. Where the grass is poor, grazing is also limited, requiring the movement of herds. In turn, this leads to nomadism. The Changpa nomads are not fully nomadic, as they live in sheltered winter camps and walk their herds into the high pastures of the Zhanskar range in the Himalayas. Uphill in the summer and downhill in the winter, they practice a form of transhumance. The goats are one of three species found in Ladakh, Tibet and Nepal, and in Ladakh are called Changthani. Gorgeous creatures with coats that range from deep chocolate to cream, the goats are the backbone of family income.

The Changpa gentleman I met talked to me about moving his goats in a circular route, leaving on auspicious days as advised by the Buddhist Langna Rinpoche at the monastery in Korzok, elders, and the shifting of the seasons. (Fully nomadic people do not follow specific circular routes). He talked about how wool prices fluctuate, and as he skilfully removed wool from a pelt, whether his children would stay with tradition. While we were there a young mother of the village group came over to ask him some questions, her small girl gazing over the huge open landscape, silver baubles on her pink hat sparkling in the July sunshine.

His wife made us yak butter tea in the tent, a semi-permanent hole with some stones in the walls and a yak-woven fabric for the roof. One of his daughters was the same age as mine, and spoke English from winter school in Leh. We chatted about homework. They bonded.

The family were wearing homemade wooly hats, and along the road at various tea shacks were hand knitted socks and hats for sale as income income supplements. In my research I’ve picked up a creator story about why the shawl industry started in J&K. A 15th century Sufi saint came from Persia to Kashmir, and on a 1400s road trip to Ladakh (the mind boggles) noticed that the mountain people had the raw materials for a weaving industry to jump-start economically poor Kashmir. He ordered up a pair of socks which he gifted to the king. The king, Zain ul Abideen, loved the socks so much he set up weavers to be trained by the Saint’s guys from Persia. The sock story demands more attention I feel. But it does point to old trading routes and the supply in trade between pastoralists and agrarians.

The interdependency between nomads and goats is based on climate. The goats put on fur for the cold winter and moult it in the warmer spring, given a judicious hand by the Changpa who comb the goats in spring to encourage the fur removal. The goats are unharmed by the process as it is their seasonal moulting period, and I can attest to having seen some awfully scraggy coats of moulting goats, so the combing of these beasts at the moment when they need it seems sensible for both goats and nomads. I wonder if the coat scraggle is now dependent on a good comb, as these two mammals have been interdependent for a very long time.

The winter-underduvet of the Himalayan Changthani goat local to Ladakh has the finest, warmest hair at between 10-15 microns, and is considered the finest raw pashmina source on the planet. India contributes about 1% to global production of cashmere wool and the best comes from these fiercely difficult mountain environments. This tiny fibre is counted in 50-100 milligrams per goat per moult. It is clear the production of pashm fibre is a hard-won living. Once spun and then woven it becomes pashmina.

I didn’t know then that the nomad’s existence was so threatened.

The gentleman I met expressed fear that his children would not want to continue the harsh experience of one of the coldest winters on earth at -40 degrees. The colder the winter, the more the goat under-duvet. The colder the winter, the warmer the possibilities of a built house in Leh. We all live in a modern world. We talked of homework and we talked of Leh in the winter. Bertie’s new friend said she preferred the winters in town.

From the research I’ve done recently, it seems that over the ten years the number of nomad families still running goats has dropped to sixteen. This seems to me to be an unsustainable amount of pashm fibre for the needs of shawl sellers in Jammu and Kashmir, and beyond. This could be an artisinal industry on the verge of collapse.

The attacks are multiple. Warmer winters are leading to increased rainfall and less snow. In turn, goats put on less winter fur, and it’s less fine. More rain is messing with vegetation patterns, and winter feed is being trucked in as government subsidies to prevent goat starvation.

The Tso-Moriri Lake area bristles with antennas and checkpoints. Military sensitive since China expanded its borders in 1957, this region is awash with army and borders are secure. The transient, traditional ways of the tribal families are no longer supported by porous border access. Pastures once reached as part of the pastural migration are not necessarily legally accessed. The wider trading into Tibet for pashm was cut off at its knees when border security tightened, the knock on impact being significant rises in the value of the goat fibre but also increased pressure to have goats on the same high pastures. This was never a high value, fast output activity. This was a seasonal dance, the nomads dependent on their animals, in turn dependent on them.

Other causes of concern to the wider industry are the ladies who spin. Many of the traders coming into the region sell the wool in Jammu and Kashmir. This fellow in a very covetable hat and highly necessary shades was walking to Leh, perhaps three days out by foot. The ponies trundled on without him, and he had to cut our questions short as they disappeared into the big blue vista. His wool will be traded into the network of buyers that sell on to the weavers and shawl houses of Kashmere.

The wool predominantly finds its way to Jammu and Kashmere, with Srinagar a centre of weaving and then embroidery. Once the raw wool finds its way into the system, it is then spun into thread, and this is then woven on hand looms. Traditionally a domestic, piece-work industry, done by women at home, the appallingly low rate of pay for spinning have made it an uneconomic choice. At 1 rupee per thread, women were leaving their generational practice and looking for work elsewhere. Spinning is traditionally a slow, drawn out affair, with the 250-500 milligrammes needed to make enough wool for one shawl taking two months to spin. Critically the staple length is around 1.75-2 inches long, and hand spinning creates a longer staple that is fragile but less breakable than shorter machine-spun pashmina. The shawl itself, a gossamer light creation made from some of the finest handmade natural fibre humans can make, takes a month to weave by hand.

Let us focus on the numbers. The data available on wool production varies but in essence each goat produces low amounts of usable wool from the moult, after being washed and sorted, or carded. Here are the numbers again: approximately 100 milligrams of wool per goat, 250-500 milligrams per shawl, two months to spin the yarn and one month to weave it into a shawl on a hand loom, the fibres too sensitive to withstand the vibration of a power loom, the hard whack of a wooden shuttle against a yarn 12-15 microns thick. India produces 40-50 tonnes annually. These shawls are hard won.

This question of time has led to a number of interesting developments. Somewhat unscrupulous weavers have chemically added plastic to the natural fibre to give it resistance to the power loom. This is then removed, once woven, by a mild acid bath. The fibre shrinks, and pills, and does no favours to the quality of the brand or trust in what is a pashmina. A power loom from Amritsar takes 15 minutes to make a shawl from a range of non-pashm fibres. The value of a pashmina shawl is much higher than a wooden or synthetic shawl, so the appeal to cut corners is strong.

Point of sale is another matter. This incredible yarn deserves to be woven into interesting, modern designs as well as traditional weaving patterns. As Judy Frater says, let the artisans have agency in their designs. Find ways to experience teaching centres like Somaiya Kala-Vidaya in Bhuj. Encourage national and international residencies and collaborations.

Other developments include international sellers of pashmina (or cashmere) shawls looking for ways to up production. The yinder is a traditional bit of kit that winds the spun fibre, to which the enterprising Me and K luxury brand has added a pedal and a dedicated work space. Spinning times are on the up, and same amount of wool needed for a shawl takes 40 days, not two months. The women sit more comfortably, and the Government of Kashmiri has upped the minimum spin wage to 2.5 rupees per thread. Let’s hope the supply of Ladakhi wool is able to keep up.

The Government of Kashmir is slowly realising that it needs to protect this amazing resource (it has been busy with other matters, to be fair) and is doing work using AI technology to geo-identify each pashmina product. As cheddar cheese is to Somerset, champagne is to France, pashmina is to Jammu and Kashmir. There are plans afoot to control pricing and give the pashmina shawl a $160 starting price point, although whether any of this will reach the goats is another matter. There are plans to involve J and K in craft and artisan safaris as their artisan cottage industries are in tatters, post political troubles and post pandemic. It is worth noting that pashmina wool also comes from the high altitude areas of Kinnar, Lehaul, and the Spiti Valley.

The families that endure freezing winters and a traditionally hard way of life are recompensed by the goat fibre having a higher value than before China expanded its borders. But their way of life is definitely under threat. They are a living, breathing pastoral tribal tradition that possibly stretches back to the Harrapan Civilisation 300-400 BCE, Caesar in Rome, Cleopatra in Egypt, the Kushan rulers of Kashmir 1 BCE to 3 AD.

If Kashmir was trading wool on the Silk Route, which academics in the textile world think it was, it seems likely that Pashmina shawls might have been among the first luxury goods traded into the Roman Empire. Marco Polo may have missed this on his travels on the Silk Road but there is strong evidence for the 15th century having documented pashmina production, which is still a good 700 years or so. Every Indian lady has a shawl of some kind, providing a soft physical and psychological buttress against the world.

These historic links through time and space deserve to be cherished and encouraged. At key points along the high altitude roads are Buddhist shrines, prayers sent skyward to Lord Buddha each time a flag snaps in the chilly wind. Votive offerings are laid. I found a goat horn at one, reminding us of the importance of these animals to the nomads living here. They are going to need these blessings.

I wish I had solutions. The value of the goat fibre might increase so much that the tribal children see value in their traditional lifestyle, bringing education and technology back into the community. Old ways can be improved. Goat kids can be microchipped. Husbandry can be improved. Winter food can continue to be shipped in.

I’m thinking hard about how I can do my bit, and three routes play to my strengths. First, this. Reminding us to buy hand made over any kind of power loom. To buy responsibly. To pay properly. Secondly a photographic series on the subject, an ongoing concept I’m working on, looking for collaborations on the ground. Third, responsible, thoughtful, slow textile tours, on the trail of this historic, mesmerising fabric.

Not many visitors make it this high and this far into the dry deserts of Ladakh.

By supporting local community homestays, working with local not-for-profits that work with the tribespeople, and finding ways to be involved that go directly to the herders of these feisty goats, perhaps we can make a little positive difference. Seed balls will be catapulted. Shawls purchased. Artisans supported.

There will be high altitude walking and workshops. You need to be of average or above fitness and generally healthy to participate.

September is a beautiful time to be in Ladakh…

…and I’m looking at a 14 day tour beginning in Delhi and ending in Leh.

Dates and prices to be confirmed but currently hovering around the second and third weeks of September 2024, at approximately £3690 (tbc).

This is an adventure. Do join me on a a journey into the Western Himalayas following the trail of these beautiful shawls. Places are limited to 8 only.

Pop me an email if you’d like to know more, via the button below.

Come with me and see for yourself.

Love Travel Guides India Review 2023

Hand in the air, I worked on the original Footprint Guide to South India way back in the late 1990s. The editor and writer Bob Bradnock was my PhD supervisor, and he set me to work making notes on life in Trivandrum and Kovalam, rather than encouraging forensic academic publishing about sustainable tourism. Hey ho. I learnt how to write and more vitally, how to research. I’m still in love with India and my tours work hard to be responsible and sustainable.

Guide books are a mixed blessing. Shining a light onto the nuts and bolts of travel, you can now cross-check information with the web, which provides an extraordinary resource to confirm a train time or look at hotel bathrooms. It’s also a source of unbridled opinion, of subjective responses and emotional moments. Not that a guide book can’t lean in those directions.

Who can forget the pale yellow “Africa On the Cheap” (implying it was only about the cheap) or the thought provoking title of “India - a travel survival kit”. Those who had been on the ground were worth their weight in gold. We thought those who had drunk Tusker at the Thorn Tree cafe in Nairobi had the traveller’s upper hand, the travel insight and experience that morphed into the information flow on the 70’s overland hippie trail across Africa and Asia.

Part of the late 1960s dropping out vibe included following the hippie trail, and Crowther’s hand-drawn maps and commentary in the Africa guide books  gave a sense of being on the inside, sharing the information with a like-minded fellow traveller. Never a tourist. Be aware, Instagrammers, that your annotated photographs with red arrows pointing to entrances might be used for military purposes, as (allegedly) were the Lonely Planet maps for Addis Ababa when the Ethiopian government was overthrown.

My brother had a tatty copy when we lived in Kenya from his hitchiking trip up to Egypt. I used to open it as a dreamy adolescent, reading paragraphs about hotels to avoid and buses to catch. The difficulties of travelling alone. The various illnesses I might pick up. Had the Magic Bus been functioning when I hit my early twenties, I would have been on it.

I should have done my thesis on the influence of guidebooks in shaping the political and social imaginations of the Western World. Think back to Marco Polo (possibly imagined in 1299, visits to the China and South East Asia), Ibn Battuta commenting on India in the 1400’s. The travel guide is not a new thing. And Crowther’s 1970s counter-culture influence on those travelling to the third world, through his somewhat left-wing rhetoric of the Lonely Planet publications.

Travel guides, however, only really swing into focus when you’re making a trip. The specifics of itineraries, the prompts for things to do. Tripadvisor has taken half the fun out of the planning, opening up the adventure through curated images. Expectation management is now through an Instagram shot, Jodhpur a city we expect to be blue at every turn. It’s not. Nor is the Pink City pink from here to there. The jumble of electricity wires and piles of rubbish tend not to make it into Instagram, much as the early guide books had a “Not worth a visit” code for places the writers wanted to keep to themselves. Be careful what you Instagram.

These are subjectives. The social media masses give a star rating, so we aim for a 4.9 and think it must be ok as others have rated it thus. Tourism mass experienced.

So - a brief dip into my bookshelves give me the following.

If you’re after good history, good hotel and food, and a geographers love of maps, the Footprint Guides are excellent. As are the Blue Guides, which have a tendency to being a tad heavy in kilogrammes but are superbly deep on history and architecture. The Brandts are good on photos and the big tourist attractions. The Lonely Planet is worth a look, stronger on the bigger cities, good on hotels. The Rough Guides are another take, good in broad strokes, somewhat opinionated.

Which brings me, circuitously, to Fiona Caulfield’s LoveTravelGuides. Advice for luxury vagabonds hints at the traveller rather than tourist, a decision to travel expensively.

These guides are a reminder of the old days when books were more than just books, where paper counted, and the smell of the binding transported us to libraries and maps (I’m a SOAS Geographer so have extensive map library memories).

The series is printed on handmade paper in Jaipur, with a string and tassle for marking one’s place, and what are billed as a local’s guide to what to see and where to go. I think they are well researched and interestingly presented. I am slightly irritated by my need to have them in my luggage as they are a wee bit heavy, but I do, and they are great.

Just a thought. These books are heavy and the publishers have done this pointedly, using delicious artisan paper. This feeds into my theory about heavyweight paper invites implying an upmarket social event. Paper carries weight, social and intellectual. I digress.

This is a bit of blurb I found on the internet:

“Fiona Macauley left her work as the President of a consulting firm to create the Love Travel brand and set up an artisanal publishing house. For the last decade, Fiona has worked to help clients fall in love with India, and has worked with designers to source and produce in the country. Fiona’s discerning eye for the singular experiences that set a destination apart has resulted in her completely hand-crafted books, which have become regarded as the flagship guides for travel in India”.

So there you go.

Long on illustration and thankfully short on photographs, the illustrations and text allow us to imagine, rather than present someone else’s reality. The introductions to Delhi and Rajasthan are by cultural commentators, thoughtful and researched. These are focused, detailed guides rather than a pan-Indian masala. The eating, shopping, drinking and staying tend to be focused on a combination of experience and retail therapy, researched and enjoyed by people living and regularly visiting these cities. The double edge sword of tourism writing means exposing the hidden corner is to change it. As the writers of the Lonely Planet know, once it’s in the public domain, it’s not off the radar for long.

The subjectivity of opinion is also self selecting through the price point. A hefty $79 bucks in the States or so (to match its wonderful binding) the Love Travel Guides are self selecting. These are not for backpackers or package tourists, but rather the “luxury vagabond” with resource and time. And unlike the early Lonely Planets, have less of the ‘stay here if you can afford it’ and more of the £££ categories. Which we love. These books resoundingly know their market.

If you can find a current version outside India, and are planning a trip to Goa, Bangalaru, Delhi, Mumbai or Jaipur, these are worth buying. I know the Delhi and Jaipur versions, and can vouch as someone who has lived and worked in India that these are excellent resources.

The guide book you select reflects what you’re looking for. A first trip to India might benefit from the broader brush, more catholic approach. For those of us going back regularly, the Love Jaipur or Love Delhi gives an insight much appreciated. “A flagship guide”. I think the Lonely Planet probably marks the flagship. We’re just wake trailing.

If you’d like a bespoke itinerary I offer travel designer services to navigate authentic and interesting experiences in India. Drop me a email.

Alternatively, come with me on a trip to India and discover the culinary delights of South India or the textiles of the North for yourself.

https://www.aliwarnerphotography.com/tour-dates?view=calendar&month=09-2023

Japan: The Bug Blog

Bug Blog

The beetle adventuring in Japan had many layers. From working in a portable moth trap that travelled from Bosham to Okinawa to Shikoku, Kyoto and Echizen, from supermarkets to campsites, to visiting museums and temples, the beetles and moths swung into focus right through the trip.

We travelled first to Okinawa, to visit family. Okinawa has very specific beetles and the ecological centres are rightly keen to disseminate information on these shy creatures. I kept thinking of Wallace and his Longhorn obsession, and how he managed to collect his beetles in 19th century South Asia, with no handy campervan or air-conditioned Seven-11 corner shops. We had it easy in the campervan. Despite the 36 degrees and 84% humidity.

The Nawa Insect Museum in Gifu had amazing exhibits. The Museums made reference. The art had definitive pieces. Ecological centres reminded us of the macro world, of Okinawa’s endemic longhorns, the airport exhorting us not to smuggle rare species. Frankly, the beetles were everywhere.

All across our trip, insects were making nests, buzzing lights, out-manoeuvring us in the public bathrooms, and popping up all over the place physically and culturally.

Cricket made from bamboo leaf, Ecological Centre, Okinawa. July 2023

Palm leaf Millipede (not an insect) decorating a snack bar at Hedo Point, Okinawa.

Gifu: The Nawa Insect Museum

One morning at the post office on the coast near Echizen I found a Moonmoth, taking its last gasps. It felt like a gift. Jack found me a larval case of a Cicadas, hanging onto a branch by a beach in Okinawa, ugly in its sharp talons and spikes but beautiful in its translucence. I left it on the shelf museum in Staff and Beck’s house, a reminder of our road trip to the north of the island. I would have loved to have found a big cricket. It seems, on a sample of one (me) and from random bug trapping and visiting loos in camping-spot car parks at night, that the rural insect life of Japan is alive and well.

Jack also found me a hard-ass, kick-boxing ju-jitsu black longhorn beetle, one wing case missing, at the Paper Temple in Echizen, the beetle angry in death as he was aggressive in life. I can see where the manga/Marvell/Superhero characterisations are drawn from. It was scary, close up.

The nuts and bolts of macro photography on the hoof were interesting. Advance preparations before the trip, I had practiced the workflow and was treated to a night of moth catching with my Bosham chums Paul and Nicky, who have a proper moth trap. This gave me the opportunity to develop my macro photographic studio on the dining room table, and work on my camper-van sized moth trap and studio.

Various moth trap designs were iterated in the garden at Number 2, and my brother Stafford made me a stick and base in Okinawa (supermarket visitation pre sake and sushi) that I could wrap my LED UV light string around and then pack it down to travel. It worked a treat. There was much excitement on the balcony when the Rhinoceros Beetle landed, slightly stunned, and I did a morning of photography and beetle fridge-catch-release. Note the carefully packed Chinese take-away containers, flown all the way from Chichester…

Photographic lighting was boosted by LED panel lights that operate on batteries, brought from the UK, and the backdrop was the product shot box that collapses. I was not stopped at customs. Although Japanese customs would have been fine, as it turns out Japanese kids have a culture of beetlemania in the summer hols. Practically every shop we went into had beetle boxes, food, traps, stickers, booklets on beetle care. I felt I’d arrived on a planet that understood my obsession. What everyone thought was madness in England is normal in Japan.

The moths and beetles were fridged to reduce friskiness and then gently wrangled with a paintbrush into the centre of the backdrop. Jack had things to say about wild beetles in our drinks fridge but they were contained (mainly). Dead critters were way easier to manage. One morning outside Kyoto on a lakeside camp, a large green beetle was washed up on the strand line. Another gift. Iridescent green, 4cm long, and with impeccable still life manners. I found some pieces of driftwood and spent a happy (if sweaty) morning in my pyjamas, taking gorgeous still life images of the various beetles and moths I’d collected, head inside the product box, LED lights on. And with my Speedlight, the most useful flash ever.

Tokyo threw up a few entomological surprises. The National Museum of Tokyo (perfect in every way) had a room on scientific and artistic recordings of insect life, which is clearly deeply embedded in Japanese culture and art.

The scientific insect illustrations were both anatomically correct and artistic, scientific drawing at its best. The medium was a long, concertina folded book of handmade paper, unfolded and laid out down a huge table, probably 20 feet long. No room for mistakes on the notation and drawings, as every page counted and was visible. In that moment I felt a collision of interests, a conscious ping where paper, beetles, concertina books and museums all came together in one heady rush. It was quite an afternoon.

The scientific illustrations made were joyous.

The woodcut prints we encountered were breathtaking. Monotone prints done in the 1760s, with the essence of beetle captured in the sweep of a shiny horn and the prickle of a spiny leg. I was entranced. Ito Jakucho had called his woodcut series ‘Exquisite Flowers from the Realm of Immortals’. I’m leaning into this for the title of my next series of images around the theme. Adding beetles. I loved that Ito had celebrated leaves with insect bites, the evolution of nature. It doesn’t have to be a perfect leaf every time. It can be bitten and chewed or damaged. I often photograph these life cycles. It felt very exciting and supported to be reminded that my thinking and fine art pieces are part of a wider tradition.

This pink chap is my offering.

And this!

This image below is from a poster to a previous archaeological exhibition in the National Museum of Tokyo. Bug eyed. Brilliant. How can early inhabitants of the archipelago not have been influenced by the flying fauna and biting insects that would have been such a huge part of their lives? The huge eyes on a dragonfly. The lenses on a praying mantis. The chirruping wings of a bell cricket. This was their world. We’ve lost access to it now, with our buildings designed to keep insects out and us in.

The hard work editing the images has yet to be done. Japan is a visual feast, curated and thought through at every turn. I hope my beetle and moth photographs and gravure prints will do justice to the insects of Japan.

Moonscapes at the Chichester Open Studios 2023 - Venue 79

The Open Art Studios are a wonderful thing. A focus, a deadline. For the past six months my creativity has revolved around the moon as much as the moon has revolved around us. 

Inspired by the NASAs moon photos, I’ve been finding ways to connect images that give me a sense of place and seasonality. 

As the winter storms surged through I found myself making MoonStorms, where winter clouds obscure and roll across the sky. My thoughts shifted to deep winter and ice, and how ships winter the icier margins of our planet. I became rabbit-holed by ships beset, where vessels become icebound, moribund, trapped. NASA writes about the sun’s magnetic field lines tangling, crossing and reorganising near sunspots . In turn, these cause energy explosions called solar flares. Solar flares are linked to changing weather patterns, and changing weather patterns influence the ice in the poles.

I imagine those magnetic lines tangling round the hill of the old clipperships, a magnetic kraken holding the ship captive. The tidal tug of the moon helpless. MoonShip imagined.

As the winter rose, I have evening shots of the rising tide in Bosham, dark watery villagescapes that reflect tide and mudflats, tides held captive by lunar events. 

Spring. The mood lightens. My attachment to hares manifests strongly in spring, as the seasons shift and my friend the author Charlie Flindt sends me video clips of hares mucking about on his land. Belfry Hare has me in its sights. The sap rises, and by late April I’m looking for the lacework of young cow parsley in the hedges, enjoying the white against the sharp vernal green, silhouetted against the paschal moonscape in Bosham. 

Midsummer is a time of slow high tides and south-westerlies that let classic wooden boats drift up the creek. Wine on the deck, the fire pit keeping us warm as giant hawk moths hum across our heads illuminated by a fat rising moon, navigating. The lines blurred by light pollution. 

I can barely begin to describe my love for beetles, precipitated by a childhood examining bugs with a hand lens and long trips to the Nairobi Museum bug room with my mother. I worry about the beetles. If my worry beads have names, the impact of light pollution on beetles is one of them. The ancient Egyptians had malas made of stone-carved scarabs, the connection circling itself. MoonBug is probably my favourite. The expression of my heart. Totemic, respecting the insects that pollinate our lives. If I can return the totemic favour by making resonant images that raise the issue, and return the protection, then my work has some meaning. The MoonBug is a thing that finds me and places me in the universe. 

I plan to gravure my MoonBug on mulberry Japanese paper.

These are my connections and thoughts, my signposts and navigations of my journey with the images on the walls at the Chichester Open Studio 2023. The making of these is a cross- pollination, as Sanne Bjerknes writes in the Dark Mountain Vol 22: ‘a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.’ Denominated by the moon. 

I look forward to showing you the final limited editions, printed on Hahnemuhle Hemp paper at A4 and A3, in person. Venue 79 , Mariners Terrace in Bosham.

Found on the Strandline

Greetings on a rainy Wednesday morning in April. I’ve been holed up these last two months, Cyanotype printing for the Emsworth and Chichester Art 2022 Trails that take place the weekend of the 23/24th April and the 30th/1st and 7/8th of May.

The Strandline Portfolio is evolving into printed images created around objects I spot on the edges of our harbour, of the moments of ecological events (100-year storms, pollution and plastic in the Harbour), of the interconnected mess of ecological communities and life. I’ve tea-stained some wonderful Storm Eunice waves. The hundred- year storm. Possibly a once-in-lifetime-event.

Storm Eunice 18th Feb 2022. Cyanotype on Khadi, A5, tea stained.

Curating for art trail content is hard for me. On the one hand I need to present a coherent, connected body of work that has a strong story and looks great up on the wall. On the other hand, I want to share the alchemy and excitement of the dimroom and how one piece of work sometimes leads into another. The two positions are not always mutually exclusive. However, making Libran decisions on which images are in and in what format, framed or unframed, mounted or unmounted…you can see how reaching the point of display is more than nail biting.

The ‘Found on the Strandline’ series is coming together, and I’m hustling the idea around my head of the same image(s) treated in three different ways. A foundling crab or a wave from Storm Eunice, printed in the studio as a Cyanotype, (Prussian blue) a tea-toned Cyanotype, (deep chocolate) and a giclee print (black and white). I’m not set on it just yet but it’s an idea.

Sputnik Sea Urchin, part of the global trade in sea life. This species is not rare, found in the Indo- Pacific regions, available from Amazon…teastained on A5 Khadi paper.

I’m also exploring what the strandline means and to whom. Ecologically, it’s the line of debris found on the beach where the tide goes out. But there are wider strandlines that inform my thinking.

Stonepillow is a local homeless charity that works with people on the strandline of society. A good number of the still life subjects that call to be photographed I have found in Stonepillow. Jelly moulds and old souvenirs.

These are the connections.

Work in progress. Studio tea-staining experiments underway.

Jelly Mould, Glass. Stonepillow 2022. Found on the Strandline.

Another find at Stonepillow has made its way into the series. This is a carved leopard cowrie with Florida’ etched into the nacre and a little ‘Made in the Philippines’ sticker on its shelly lips. Heartbreaking. The need for Philippine communities on economic strandlines making tourist souvenirs, sourced from their own local tidal pools and reefs, and sent across the world for ecologically ignorant tourists to buy. As if they’d picked it up off the Florida beaches. Species on the strandlines of ecological risk.

Another work in progress. Probably a giclee print of this ecosouvenir.

The tidal connections that make up our wider society, ecological, social, economic, are repeating themes in my work.

In the meantime: Save the Date for an art trail visit. At Emsworth I’m in the Methodist Church Hall (the atrium next to the tearooms, so super-central) and I’m at Number 2, Mariners Terrace, Bosham for the Chichester Art Trail.

And - a decision made - please consider yourself invited to the Private View on Friday 29th April, 4-8pm at Number 2. (I’m sending out a digital invite but if you read it here and would like to come, do email me back. I keep a very loose grip on the numbers!).

It will be a delight to see you.

On Paper…

I love paper. I love the smooth, satiny feel of a blue writing paper for letters home or thank yous. I love the onion-skin whisper of airmail paper, where we had to use blotting paper regularly to keep one side of lettering from becoming mirrored words on the reverse. I love handmade khadi paper made from recycled clothes. I love Reeves watercolour for salt printing, Hahnemulhe platinum rag for Cyanotypes, bamboo rag for giclee printing. Being a practising alternative photographer means I am allowed to indulge my paper habit officially. 

Botanical stain assessment

In Japan where paper is still (just about) an art form, they have Goddesses to thank. Always by water, the shrines are offered prayers and little votives. (I’m hoping these are origami flowers, the circle met). The mineralogy of the water impacts the final form of these hand-made laid papers, treasured now and treasured before by those as remote but engaged as da Vinci. Paper found its way via the Silk Roads to Italy and beyond. Mulberry papers. Paper as thin and delicate as the Indian muslins going the other way. 

Cyanotype salts react with varying papers in different ways. Platinum Rag behaves itself, rarely offers up surprises. Indian khadi paper is like dealing with the Indian Railways pre-computerisation, an unpredictable paper with the occasional wild outcome. It suits me for certain days. 

The light-sensitive coating is applied under dimroom conditions. I have a difficult time with the glass rod technique when I wear latex gloves, and sometimes I prefer to use my Hake brush and pray to the Goddesses that the coatings won’t pool and the paper will clear when I wash it. Coating papers takes about two to three hours for twelve 10x8” papers and some khadis. The physical process is a couple of minutes, but the drying time forces reflectivity. Making digital negatives takes about an hour per image. And exposing the images in the UV box I made takes about eighteen minutes. Eight minutes to wash and tone, fifteen mins under another wash, about an hour to dry. Is that about four hours an image? It’s a seven stage process from beginning to end. 

Micro-leaf

The images reflect their paper substrate, their washes, the humidity on the day. Each one is a little artisan miracle. Each one is different. There is, in my world, little excitement about reproducing the same image exactly time and time again. Little differences are to be celebrated, as much as one moon jellyfish in Bosham Creek might be different to the next. 

The print runs are tiny, and they won’t be repeated. My time in your hand.  

Cyanotypes are sometimes fugitive. This means they might fade. You might choose to live with a artisan paper print that is energetically alive, and embrace the fade, or you can pop the image is a light-tight drawer and regenerate the image. They’re better not hung in sunlight, and UV glass helps. 

Cyanotypes 101

Cyanotypes are subtle and beautiful. You can have the image a deep Prussian Blue, or dye it with teabags to make a fairly stable brown. Sometimes fugitive, endlessly creative, Cyanotypes are a great intro into the world of alternative photography.

The process is simple. Mixi two iron salts together, which metamorphose into a light sensitive solution. Coat an art paper. Dry the paper. Expose the paper with a negative or subject on the surface. Wash the paper. Dry the paper. You’re done.

The opportunity to coat the art paper with brush strokes or in shapes is the start of the creative process. I call it Cyanotherapy. You heard it here first!

I’ve made a wee #101 video under my foraged_photographs banner outlining the very simple steps of the process. I haven’t used glass to contact print in the vid, but you can put a piece of glass over the top of a bit of plant or feather to sharpen up the edges.

Workshops are available to learn this beguiling process. Have a look at the workshop dates in the calendar.

Wet Plate Photography Workshop, Straza.

A week in Slovenia. Silver-nitrate stains on my fingers. New friends. Diving under the dark cloth of a bellows field camera made in Alleppey (all roads lead to India).

Wet plate photography is not for the faint hearted. You have to have nerves of steel when pouring plates, and my new friend Basil’s calm hands for varnishing. It was complex. It was captivating. Our teacher Borut Peterlin kept us busy on a stratospheric learning curve.

Here’s the evidence.

https://youtu.be/nb8JX89yWts

Ljubljana’s Dragons

Slovenia is a rare gem. Snuggled between Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia, I flew into Ljubljana against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains that frame the city. En route to a workshop and somewhat forced into spending an extra few days in Slovenia due to Wizz Air changing their flights (again), I’ve been exploring Ljubljana by boot and Boris Bike. Only unlike London the Boris Bikes are free for an hour. Most of the bits you might want to see are within the sixty minutes, so I’ve been the the Museum of Contempary Art, various churches, and today an epic cycle to Zale which is the main cemetery for the city.

Much of Ljubljana is touched by the fingerprints of the architect Jose Plecnik, who designed the very lovely three bridges across the river, the market place, various National buildings and in the critical years of 1938/40, the monumental entrance to Zale Cemetery. I crossed the bridges, bought a curious green and red lettuce at the market and a delicious pork chop for my supper, and visited the cemetery. Plecnik and I have crossed paths.

Used by all and sundry to publicly mourn their beloved since 1906, the funerary architecture ranges from Art Deco to 40s & 50s brutalist headstones, which I find I have developed a passion for. Along with various angel types and Jesus. Just to be clear- my passion for Jesus lies only in ecclesiastical imagery and art. I love churches but not the church.

The sun was shining hard and I found most of my angels had their backs to it, which made for some interesting photography. For some reason I haven’t photographed the monolithic entry building that Plecnik built, which was an oversight. I was probably rushing towards an angel. For fools rush in, etc etc. After the tortoise-wrangling incident in the English Cemetery on Corfu (it’s a story for another day) I now do a quick shoulder check before I disrespectfully stand on the edge of a grave to find my angle, but I don’t mean it disrespectfully. If anything these images are taken with the greatest of interest and appreciation of form.

The great expanse of shiny black granite felt like a lake against the neat white gravel surrounding the grave. The cemetery allows people to plant trees, so throughout the grounds are wonderful mature conifers that add a soft edge to the hard lines of the headstones. It’s very beautiful. This headstone with its granite lake was huge. It struck me that the space delineated by the edges of the tombs are a both a public and private mourning space. Guy Cools wrote in his recent book ‘Performing Mourning’ (spotted and read for a while at the Ljubljana Museum for Contemporary Art) that grief is the private expression, and mourning the public expression, of loss.

I’d not thought about it in those terms. Applied, this might mean that headstones and their space are a public space, however that express very private emotions. The aesthetics don’t always parallel. I spotted the most beautiful, simple granite headstone that had been left with painted pebbles as votives. The pebbles were horrible. Acrylic painted hearts, badly done. Probably by grandchildren which is makes them more acceptable but visually, made me cringe. This subject of the need for family to adorn and decorate, to leave a visual and physical representation of their votive, whether it be flowers or pebbles or baby Jesus figurines, is something I circle back to.

There was a particularly simple and beautiful grave that caught my eye. It offered a balance and symmetry, the headstone simple, the form uncomplicated, and a large stone vase for flowers was built in at the bottom left of the grave space. It was perfect. There was a respectful distance of vase to headstone, a sense of space. Not one, normally, for colour, it seems an example of the relationship between understanding the architectural strength of simplicity and the need for personal responses by the mourner. I imagine the departed soul loved yellow and sunflowers.

I can’t resist an angel.

This one above has a Cubist feel to her although the next one is interesting. There’s a slightly naturalistic headstone, a female form that’s a wee bit angelic, then a Cubist block to the right of the plinth, closing the space down. And a strong sense of sunlight.

The natural form of this mother figure above resting her arm in the super-modern-shiny gravestone caught one’s attention. The visual jump between hard and soft, the colours and tones. It feels secularly angelic with its Eastern Europe Workers Union vibes. I love this more and more.

And then, near the exit, this. The votive lanterns and the reflections in the granite were irresistible. It was on a big scale for a private tomb. Expensive and beautiful. Bravo. I’m hoping to carbon print this one.

---

On dragons…

There were no dragons at Zale. Heironymus Bosch had the drop on early dragons with their wild connections to the underworld. Funerary artists are far too sensible to risk a crazy reptile with connections to Hell on a headstone.

In town, it’s a different story. The dragons are part of Ljubljana’s creation myth. This involved Jason and the Argonauts and the slaying of a swamp dragon. The tourist board obviously think it’s a good hook. Chocolates, the tourist shops, drainage covers and a bridge have dragons. They are rather fine things for a big reptile with wings.

On my travels around Ljubljana I also spotted this memorial with birch trees and three flagpoles. No dragons in sight. I now think it has the feel of Plecnik to it, or if he didn’t design it, it was something that would have spoken to the architect within him.

Unlike the rather pleasing domestic architecture along both sides of the river, there is also a lot of horrible architecture built around the outskirts which frankly deserves a good kicking. Like everything post war it served a cheap and functional purpose. I get very cross with more recent badly designed architecture. Urban planners should know by now that visual eyesores impact social behaviour and values.

And I don’t care if Ljubljana tells its tourists that the graffiti subculture is cool - it’s not. It’s visual pollution. And it affects those creating it and those forced to look at it. Think New York, people. Areas mended and tidied up had lower crime rates and an improved sense of community. It’s connected.

---

On a final note. Despite the attraction of granite and shiny stone at Zale, one of the most lovely headstones was this. Gregorin and Janez, on wood, with either a bit of an age gap if they were married (26 years) or she may have been his daughter born six years before he died aged 32. Or perhaps siblings. Janez died aged 31. They both died too young.

Either way, an angel looks after them now from the headstone and there are two huge cypress trees keeping them safe. One wonders if Gregorin died in the Great War. The story feels lost.

The final story of Zale is of Ljubljana’s people, not their cemetery. This wonderful cemetery is uplifting and celebrates the human form. In death, there is life.

Foraged_Photographs

The concept behind Foraged_Photographs is simple. I’m a black and white girl at heart. Lockdown gifted the time to explore older analogue techniques of printing, and I found a range and voice within these techniques I had not expected. Cyanotypes were a blessing from the blue.

As I move more deeply into alternative photography and explore printing techniques that include botanical staining and making argyrotypes in rich browns, I’ve decided to separate my prints by style and technique. Foraged_Photographs, with a focus on the natural, allows me the distinction.

Much of the content focuses on foraged materials. Mushrooms, plants. The botanical stains include old man’s beard and teabags.

New ideas and creative directions for 2022 include wet plate collodian, carbon printing, big salt prints and argyrotypes. I’m building the skill set for polymergravure, a hardcore printing technique. There is much to do! I am planning an outdoor print day, printing and processing big prints on the harbour in the summer, and you are most welcome to participate and become part of the process.

All of my work is supported through teaching and selling prints. If you would like to support my creative growth please become a Patreon which gives you special access to exhibitions, limited editions and workshops, or gift a special Patreon workshop to yourself or another.

The website has a page for shopping. Foraged _Photographs is a category/filter within the shopping menu. Thank you so much for your support.

The Monkey God, Karol Bagh and a spot of traffic.

Nothing quite prepares you for a glimpse of a pair of bright pink cement monkey legs as you shoot a roundabout in thick traffic. Legs that have a beanstalk feel about them as you can't see out of the car window much higher than his knees. Rahul the driver points him out on the drive west through Delhi.

"Monkey God Temple. Look!"

I crane my neck to try and see his face but it's lost to me, too high for my field of view. It's a Hanuman Temple, this much I can see, but anything more is lost to the heights of the Banyan tree and the swirling traffic. I sit back, slightly underwhelmed.

I talk to my friends about the statue. "Do you follow Hanuman?" I am asked. I say no, but I'm interested in energy hotspots and cultural bits and bobs. I like to underplay the latter. Their car and driver is dropping me home, and I wonder if he can drop me off at the temple and I'll take the metro home through rush hour.

I'm taken to lunch and we aim for Sector 10 and Hakkims. Famous for its kebabs and tandoor, it's an exciting moment. Trailing up the stairs behind the team I sense their disappointment. Hakkims is shuttered. "Closed. Hanuman day. Tuesday". I look baffled.

" Tuesday is Hamuman's day. No meat for followers of Hanuman. Hakkims clientele is non-veg. " I work out the logic and then my antenna flicks on. Definitely the right time to visit this monkey god's temple.

Rahul drops me at the roundabout.

"Madam. Metro is that way. Temple entrance over there. Shoes to the keeper." And then he's gone, lost to the vortex of rush hour.

I stand for a moment after he's gone, absorbing the atmosphere, checking out the players. A couple of beggars on the peripheral, poverty stricken rather than maimed (unlike some of the bigger mosques and temples which used to be loaded with Delhi's poor). A temple keeper is ushering pedestrians off the temple frontage, which is demarcated by the shoe shelves, traffic cones and a table. To the edge of these, the roundabout is in full flood, traffic building to a crescendo of horns and beeps and roars of unloved exhausts. I walk carefully to the far edge of the temple, on the strand line between temple and transportation. The temple keeper points crossly to my feet and says "Madam. Shoes".

But I am judging, absorbing, looking. Do I want to go through the monkeys mouth enough to see inside his brain? For the main entrance, across some wetland tiling and a long, black, shoe-sole painted tongue, past his large, violently curved incisors, is through his mouth. The traffic roars, one fellow one-handedly flicking his scooter past as he clamps his mobile to his ear. The noise is so loud that an ambulance can't be heard. It's visceral, shocking. The monkey's vicious head is also at ground level, making him a two headed-beast. But you can't see his head from ground level because you'd have to walk backwards, away, for the perspective. Into that traffic. So the architects put another head in, as a funky exit, and another as a shoe-sole tongued entrance. Actually that makes three heads but nobody's really thinking about anatomy (or reality) here. I'd like a job as a Hanuman temple architect. This job spec has a brief that says 'Themepark Rollercoaster. Shock. Sensory overload." There's even a set of steps twisting upwards, up to his torso and possibly beyond, and downstairs there is a WookyHole grotto with demons and snakes and a definite House of Horrors Kali and Durga vibe. It's kitch. It's cool.

I decide to risk baring my feet and find my way in. It's unlike any temple I've ever been in, with platforms and plaster gods on several levels, and people proffering themselves on rugs and chanting religious texts from their iPhones. The colours are bubblegum pink, lime green, hot orange. Even the garlanded flower waste is beautiful.

This is not a place of restraint. This is a place of uncontrolled, riotous colour, a religious excitement. And it's TUESDAY, Hanuman day, so followers are carefully lighting little candles and touching his feet.

Which are, without being cheeky, huge. Hanuman is 108 feet tall. He needs bug feet to stand on.

This is serious worship, a candle lit, and Hanuman 's big toe suspiciously clean. A quick google later tells me it is a new temple, completed in 1997. And it's glorious. Two stands at the entrance points sell Puja offerings, doing a hotly orange business, the flags are gently flapping in the pollution, and despite rush hour, despite the traffic, people are ringing the brass bells and serious in their intent.

I pay for a tikal and a photo. Various priests call to their section, but it is Hanuman 's followers that reel me in. A sweeter priest takes pity, offers a proper tikal, sending my thought upwards towards spirituality, gently threads my wrist red. Suddenly I'm back in South India, transported to the first time a priest tied a red thread on my wrist, half a lifetime ago. I know nothing of Hanuman. But the intensity of worship and ritual I recognise.

This is a temple of the 21st century. It roars up into the skyline, cemently contoured, proud that modern paints allow the Monkey God to be seen in full transcendental Shalimar paint. It could only be where the traffic at Karol Bagh judders past, drivers and passengers making fast votive movements as they absorb his energy and spirit on the way through. Is he also a god of travel?

He is, on a Tuesday.

Centre page spread

I made the centre pages of the Chichester Observer. Once a bunny girl…

Stardust and posies

In the studio this morning I printed my Nebuli negative, something that’s been on my mind as an image for a couple of years. Originally part of the reclusive Lady Mary Tennant series, ( on the Insta). I had a feeling that the moon and clouds and stardust would lend themselves to Khadi paper and the process.

We can’t imagine Cyanotypes without thinking about Herschel. And we can’t imagine Nebuli without thinking how his father William influenced astronomy. Originally a musician, he got into stargazing and went on to make his own telescopes. The observations he made and the planets he found (including Uranus) changed the face of astronomy. Along the way, his son John worked alongside his pa and needed to replicate his notes. John Herschel came up with mixing the iron salts to create a light-sensitive emulsion from which he made blueprints. Cyan or blue prints. He’s our boy.

Ever quick to absorb the techniques, the nascent photographers of the 1840’s took to Cyan-blue mirrorless photography, and then contact printing negatives.

I make my own negatives and play with papers and emulsion in the dimroom. Todays prints were star-gazing salt pot posies, the Nebuli, and a mushroom. I listened to Melvyn Bragg on his podcast about Herschel and printed away. Star-gazing posies in a salt pot, moons and mushrooms.

I am headed to the Chichester Farmer’s Market on Friday 3rd December. Let’s pray for calm weather and Christmas crowds.

Autumn Leaves

This time of year, walking on an autumn day with the sun at my back and my hands full of leaves fills me with delight. On a dog walk this morning I came home with oak leaves, hawthorn, sycamore, hazel, beech, wild clematis, bramble, a bindweedy thing with catapillar holes, some dried flower heads that could have been Ragwort, and a redwood species that might stain well.

im working on the artistic delivery but here is a sample of shape and form.

OUR INNER MONKEYS

My good friends the Roberts sisters reminded me of the intensely important powerhouse of creativity to be found in wives and mothers in their late 40’s and early 50s. The children are spreading their wings, and for those with a career either on hold or part time, (sometimes lost by stealth, as Jess put it), moments of choice come before us. Decisions need to be made about how we are going to productively spend the next thirty years. Decisions that have the inner monkey vocal with imposter syndrome, anxious about starting again in our fifties, fearful of both being judged and being too late to the party.

These are real fears. I write from experience. Talking to my peers, those of us with less than glittering careers find it difficult to believe in ourselves.

This last two years I’ve been telling the world I’m a fine art photographer. This gives my inner monkey a name, something concrete to hang into. The spoken working title, a purpose to how I spend my time and how I identify. An artisanal photographer, as Jess coined it. I like these definitions.

Moosing about the internet I read this on ‘Salt in the age of the pixel’ by Marc Feustel on the Tate.org. Which, btw, is crap for those of us wearing reading glasses where the Tate.org logo is all cool and blurry . A bit of a finger up to those of us struggling to read small phone font on a good day. However.

‘The American artist Dan Estabrook is one of the foremost users of the salted paper print process today. For Estabrook, ‘Every handmade photograph is like a drawing or painting, or even a sculpture. It is an object first and foremost, with weight and form, not just a window into another world or another time.’

The salt printing process can make use of salt found locally. My artisanal photography takes a leaf from analogue photography but leans in on organic chemistry from coffee, developing 120mm film in agreeable kitchen chemistry, then uses these negs to contact print images onto salt prints made with local salts. Found in the sea and concentrated by boiling, the image is made of and by and with. Fellow photographers such as Brandt have forged the path in his Lakes and Reservoirs Work, supported by previous work by those in the alt photo world where Tokyo Bay Water salt print recipes were shared. The artisanal photographic world is one of disseminaters and sharers. The digital collision of salt print with pixels gives a massive canvas where I can twist the digital story with the truth of the analogue print.

Inner monkeys are being given artisanal, inky truths for ammunition. We can believe in mid-life creativity. The wives and mothers will find ways to release their inner monkey, as my great friend Kim once said.

Mushrooms & Alternative Photography

At the risk of sounding like I’ve been hitting the Liberty Caps too hard, I thought I’d explore a recent dive into mushroom season. Since last autumn I’ve been on high alert for the mushroom season, which seems in 2021 to have been later. I recently spotted a Guiness World Book of Record-breaking whopper of a Parasol Mushroom that was 9” across the top if it was a day. And the Sulfur Tufts have appeared by the Goat Willow out in the back garden. But what has me zipping about with excitement is the recently learnt fact that mushrooms can be made into paper, and that they have dyeing properties. In an ideal world this means I can print mushroom Cyanotype images on mushroom paper and tone it with a mushroom dye bath.

In the absence of mushroom paper I’m working on the dye bath. Here . in the meantime, are some ‘shrooms.

Mushroom toned with pomegranate. The mushroom bath is next up.