Sunday 20 September, 10.30-12 p.m. BST: Online Talk, Screening & Demonstration, The Art of the Toda: Thread and Touch with Coonoor & Co

Online Talk via Zoom

Coonoor & Co is a contemporary design studio and online journal shaped by slow, considered living. Our work is inspired by over a decade of engagement within the Nilgiris — a UNESCO-recognised biodiversity hotspot in southern India — and the indigenous communities that inhabit this ancient land. At the heart of their aesthetics, storytelling and craft are narratives and artisanal creations nurtured by time, space, ecology, and form.

Their studio develops small-batch contemporary apparel, home textiles and textile art that honour indigenous knowledge while placing it within thoughtful contemporary dialogue. Core to what they do is a long-standing engagement with Toda women, custodians of an ancient geometric embroidery tradition passed through generations. Together, their team, weavers and artisans have worked slowly and deliberately to bring this practice into new conversations in textile, design and art — while preserving its integrity, its authorship, and its deep-rootedness in the land that has always been its home.

Talk Description
The Art of the Toda: Thread and Touch
Deep in the high Nilgiri plateau of southern India, in small settlements nestled in montane grassland and Shola forest, lives one of the subcontinent's oldest indigenous communities. The Toda are a pastoral people, their lives long shaped by the rhythms of land, buffalo and ceremony. They number around 1,500 in the world and it is their women who are the custodians of pukhoor — a sacred counted-thread embroidery of extraordinary geometric precision, worked in red and black on ivory cotton, entirely by hand, without guides or frames. Each motif is counted purely by touch, the knowledge carried in the body and passed from one generation to the next. Fewer than 400 women actively practice it.

This embroidery is unlike almost anything else in the textile world. Reversible, almost impossibly consistent, it looks at first glance like a weave. It is not. It is generations of knowing, made visible in thread. The motifs speak of the world the Toda inhabit: buffalo horns, rays of the sun, mountain ranges, the flowers of the Shola forests, the geometries of ceremony and sacred space. 

This session brings together the story, context and living practice of Toda embroidery from the Nilgiris in southern India. Ramya Reddy will introduce the Toda community and pukhoor, their distinctive counted-thread embroidery tradition, through a relationship that began during the nine-year process of making her book, Soul of the Nilgiris. Each of the book’s 2,000 copies was bound with a hand-embroidered Toda spine, an undertaking that led to a deeper engagement with the women and their embroidery, and eventually to the textile practice and artisan collective at Coonoor & Co today.

Through photographs, textiles, short films and clips, the session will explore the language of Toda embroidery: its geometry and motifs, the extraordinary precision of working by counting threads without drawn guides, its characteristic reversibility, and the knowledge carried by the women who practise it.

Part illustrated talk, part conversation and part live demonstration, the session offers a rare opportunity to encounter Toda embroidery through its history and visual language, and directly through the women who practise it today.

The session closes with a live Q&A with the artisans.

Location
This is an online event. A PDF containing the Zoom link will be sent to you upon booking. Please ensure to download this file to access the link. 

Recording
This event will be recorded. A link to the recording will be emailed to all those who register following the live session. Please allow 7 working days for us to send you the recording.



Cancellation Policy

All places reserved for online events are non-refundable. 

Visit Coonoor & Co's Website
Follow Coonoor & Co on Instagram