Sunday 20 September, 10.30-12 p.m. BST: Online Talk & 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.

Event Description
The Art of the Toda: Thread and Touch
Toda embroidery is one of the most singular textile traditions in the world. Practiced exclusively by women of the Toda community — an ancient indigenous pastoral people of the Nilgiri plateau in southern India — it is worked in red and black on ivory cotton, entirely by hand, without guides, sketches, or frames. The women stretch the fabric with their fingers and count threads purely by touch. No pattern is drawn. No frame holds the cloth. The geometry that emerges — precise, reversible, almost impossibly consistent — is carried in the body, passed down through generations of women who learned by watching and doing.

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 is a rare opportunity to encounter that practice firsthand — live, with two senior Toda artisans demonstrating their work from the Nilgiris. Through demonstrations, film, and in-depth conversations, audiences will witness the embroidery as it happens and hear the artisans speak about their work in their own voices.

The session moves through the motifs at the heart of the Toda visual vocabulary and the materials developed specifically to hold this demanding technique. Participants are then invited into a guided observation exercise — learning to read the geometry of Toda motifs, understanding how pattern emerges purely through counting and touch, and developing a new way of seeing what the eye might otherwise pass over.

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.