TEXTILES FROM KASHMIR

Coinciding with the highly anticipated release of Selvedge's Chakra issue next week, past contributor Anne Morrell has a new book out titled Embroidered & Stitched Textile Fragments from Kashmir in the Collection of the Calico Museum of Textiles. With an upcoming review to published in the Chakra issue, we thought we'd share an excerpt from a review recently published in The Tribune, India, by B.N Goswamy...

Who else than Anne Morrell could have written a whole book on textile fragments, and what other institution than the Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad would have kept garnering, as a part of its dazzling collections, just these fragments for years together? But here it is: the result of a long collaboration between scholar and institution in the form of a beautifully brought out book: Embroidered & Stitched Textile Fragments from Kashmir in the Collection of the Calico Museum of Textiles.

Anne has an obsessive interest in textiles, someone who cares 'more about the journey than the outcome' when she works. One of the iconic figures of England in this field, she has been a teacher for long years: a Professor of Textiles at the Manchester Metropolitan University, and Head of Embroideries at that place; she has not only taught but has also been exhibiting her contemporary work ‘on four continents’, which, as a reviewer said, ‘crosses the boundaries of art, craft, applied art, and more’. 

Over the decades, her creative thinking ‘has broken the boundaries of textile terms and definitions’, experts agree. But here in India, as a researcher and teacher, she has stayed more or less at one place: the Sarabhai Foundation in Ahmedabad from where she has brought out landmark studies, now on embroidery techniques, now on structural sewing terms; she may be at ‘kantha stitches’ today, but will turn to do a whole monograph on buttons and ties and shells the next day. Phulkaris from the Punjab are as much within her ken as is applique work from the northeast and south of India. Occasionally, however, but only occasionally when she gets the time, she sits at home in her garden looking up ‘at the sky and clouds’ to ‘inform the linear movement’ in her compositions...

To read this review in full visit click here.

To pre-order a copy of the Chakra issue of Selvedge, click here.

To order a copy of Embroidered & Stitched Textile Fragments from Kashmir in the Collection of the Calico Museum of Textiles, click here.