Journeys in Cloth: The Women Behind Blickling’s Global Textiles

When I visited Blickling Hall recently, I went with textiles very much in mind. I knew I wanted to see the Ashburnham embroidered panel, but I was also keen to spend time with Journeys, the exhibition of global textiles from the Karun Thakar Collection.

What I had not expected was how strongly the exhibition would make me think about the women behind the cloth.

And the more I learned about why these particular textiles had been brought into Blickling, the more interesting that became.

Why Blickling?

This is not simply a collection of beautiful textiles placed in a historic house.

Blickling itself has a history shaped by wealth, collecting and international commerce. Objects, materials and ideas arrived through networks extending far beyond Norfolk, and the house therefore provides an appropriate setting for an exhibition concerned with movement, exchange and the journeys made by textiles.

The exhibition was developed through a long collaboration between Blickling and collector Karun Thakar, looking at the global histories connected with the house and considering how textiles could be used to tell some of those stories.

That makes the positioning of the textiles particularly interesting.

The entrance hall is dominated by portraits of men.

They are the people whose names, faces, property and status were recorded. They represent the public and powerful side of the house's history.

Karun Thakar wanted the textiles to soften that space and introduce another presence — the domestic, creative and often much less visibly recorded lives of women.

Once I understood that, I looked at the hall very differently. The textiles are not there simply to provide colour beneath the portraits, introducing  another history into the room. The men survive in paintings, many of the women survive through their stitches.

Textiles that travelled

The title Journeys is particularly appropriate because these objects have travelled in more than one sense.

Some have physically travelled enormous distances through trade, migration and collecting.

But techniques travel too. Patterns travel, materials, ideas travel, and knowledge travels.

A girl watches her mother stitch. A grandmother teaches a granddaughter. A familiar motif is repeated, altered and passed on again.

Long before written instructions, YouTube videos or downloadable patterns, textile knowledge was preserved in exactly this way.

Through people.

And very often, through women.

Cloth could say who you were

One of the things the exhibition makes clear is that these textiles were not simply decorative.

Clothing, embroidery, colour, pattern and construction could communicate a great deal about the person wearing or using them.

They might indicate where somebody came from, their community, status or the occasion for which an item had been made.

That is something we can easily lose sight of when a textile is displayed in a museum, we may see an attractive pattern or beautiful embroidery, the original maker and wearer may have seen far more.

To them, the textile could have carried a language that people within their own community immediately understood.

Phulkari and bagh

Some of the textiles that particularly caught my attention were the Punjabi embroidered pieces associated with phulkari and bagh traditions.

The word phulkari is often translated as "flower work", although the embroidery encompasses much more than simple floral decoration.

Bagh means "garden", and in these pieces the embroidery can become so dense that much of the ground fabric is covered.

Seen closely, they are extraordinary.

The repetition and rhythm of the stitches create pattern, texture and movement, but the importance of the work goes far beyond decoration.

These traditions were closely connected with family and domestic life and were passed through generations of women.

That changes the way I look at them instead of seeing simply a beautifully embroidered textile, I start imagining the learning behind it, the conversations, the corrections, the shared knowledge the hours spent stitching.

The object becomes evidence of relationships between generations.

Kantha: creating something new from what remains

Kantha work prompted a slightly different thought.

Traditionally associated particularly with Bengal, kantha often involved layers of old cloth being reused and stitched together.

There is something very appealing about that idea to a textile artist.

Fabric that might otherwise have reached the end of its useful life becomes the starting point for something new.

Rows of running stitch can cover the surface, sometimes creating extraordinarily complex patterns, figures, animals and flowers.

Today we might describe this as recycling, repurposing or sustainable textile practice.

For the women making these objects historically, it was simply part of working intelligently and creatively with the materials available to them.

That relationship between necessity and creativity feels remarkably modern.

The collector behind the collection

It was also interesting to learn more about Karun Thakar himself.

His interest in textiles is not simply that of someone who decided to collect beautiful objects.

He grew up around making.

His mother ran a couture business in Delhi and, as a child, he was surrounded by sewing and textiles and learned skills including sewing, crochet and embroidery.

I think that background matters.

When someone understands something of how cloth is constructed and how a stitch is actually made, they look at textiles differently.

It is not simply about appearance.

You begin to notice the decisions, labour and technical skill involved.

Perhaps that is also why the domestic and human stories behind these objects come through so strongly in the exhibition.

But who were the women?

This was the question I kept returning to.

Who actually made these pieces?

We may know the country or region.

We may know the approximate date.

We may know the technique.

We may know the person who collected it.

Sometimes we even know a great deal about the people who owned it.

But very often we do not know the name of the woman who spent weeks or months actually making it.

That imbalance is something I am becoming increasingly aware of in my textile research.

Historical records are very good at recording owners, patrons, merchants and wealthy families.

The maker can be much harder to find.

For domestic textile work particularly, women's skill could become so embedded in everyday life that it was almost treated as though it simply happened.

But embroidery does not simply happen.

Someone chooses the thread.

Someone places every stitch.

Someone learns how to control tension.

Someone works out how to turn a curve or fill a shape.

Someone makes a mistake and works out how to correct it.

There is knowledge in those hands.

Textiles and identity

Some of the pieces in Journeys also remind us that textile traditions can survive enormous political and social change.

Borders move.

Empires grow and disappear.

People migrate.

Trade routes change.

Yet ways of making cloth, decorating clothing and using particular patterns can continue.

Sometimes a textile becomes one of the ways a community maintains its identity while the world around it changes.

That gives these objects another significance.

They are not simply examples of technique.

They can be evidence of continuity.

The Ashburnham embroidery

 

Elsewhere at Blickling, the Ashburnham embroidered hanging adds another layer to the story.

It is large and imposing and immediately asks to be looked at.

But, as always, I found myself moving closer.

I am fascinated by what happens when you stop looking at a historic textile as one grand decorative object and begin examining the individual stitched elements.

How has the motif been constructed? how has movement been created? where has one colour been placed against another? what decisions did the person holding the needle actually make?

Those small decisions are where I begin to feel closest to the maker.

Hundreds of years may separate us, but the problems are surprisingly familiar.

Where should this line go? hoes this shape need another stitch? will that colour work? how do I make a flat piece of cloth appear alive?

Women's work

The phrase "women's work" can sound dismissive.

Historically, it often was.

Sewing, mending and embroidery were frequently regarded as ordinary domestic accomplishments rather than skilled creative work.

But perhaps we should reclaim the phrase.

This was women's work.

And that is exactly why it matters.

It tells us how women learned, how families valued cloth, how materials were reused and how traditions travelled from one generation to another.

A textile can tell us things that official documents never recorded.

Cloth as an archive

The more historic textiles I study, the more I think of them as archives made from cloth.

They contain information., not written in ink, but in thread.

A change of colour can tell us something.

A repaired section tells us that an object mattered enough to save.

A worn edge tells us it was used.

A repeated motif can reveal a tradition shared between generations.

Even the reverse of an embroidery can sometimes tell us something about the person who made it.

These objects have survived because somebody valued them.

Some have travelled thousands of miles and passed through many hands before eventually reaching a collection.

And sometimes, although the name of the original maker has disappeared completely, her stitches have survived for centuries.

There is something rather wonderful about that.

Bringing the journey forward

Perhaps that is also why these textiles feel so relevant to the work I am doing now.

I am increasingly interested in taking traditional embroidery ideas and allowing them to continue their journey.

Not by copying historic pieces, but by looking at how earlier embroiderers used line, foliage, animals, flowers and repeated motifs and asking what we can do with those ideas today.

Some may be stitched by hand.

Some may be interpreted using an embroidery machine.

The tools change.

The designs change.

But the desire to decorate cloth with thread remains remarkably constant.

And every time we learn a technique and then show somebody else how to use it, perhaps we become another small part of that journey.

When I think back to the entrance hall at Blickling, that first contrast stays with me.

The men look down from the walls in painted portraits.

But the women are there too., not necessarily in faces or names, they are there in cloth, pattern, colour and stitch, their work has travelled.

Their work has survived.

And sometimes those stitches are the closest we can come to hearing their voices.