Friday 4 September, 5-6 p.m. BST: Online Talk & Screening, The Art of the Toda: Origins and Practice 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: Origins and Practice
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.

This session traces both the embroidery and the story of how Coonoor & Co came to work alongside the Toda community — beginning with the book Soul of the Nilgiris by Ramya Reddy, each of whose 2,000 copies carries a unique hand-embroidered Toda spine, stitched by the women themselves. From that gesture grew a decade of engagement and a collective of nearly 70 artisans. Through images, film and conversation, audiences will encounter the landscapes, the motifs, the women artisans, and the vision behind a tradition that has rarely received the gaze it deserves — one of the most distilled visual languages in Indian craft, maximalism achieved entirely through restraint. The session closes with a Q&A.

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.