Fashioning Diaspora Space: Moving Patterns

Entrance to the Moving Patterns exhibition

Entrance to the Moving Patterns exhibition, The Royal Geographical Society, May 2009

Moving Patterns installation

Moving Patterns installation

Moving Patterns installation

Moving Patterns installation, showing groups of carrier bags designed by different artists on wooden pallets, as though floating together on rafts through the space.

Rafts of carrier bags on wooden pallets

Rafts of carrier bags on wooden pallets: a giant semi-translucent ‘carrier bag’ which acted as a screen for projection; and a plan chest containing drawings based on a South Asian textile shop.

Collage constructed from a photograph of a house near Green Street, London

Collage constructed from a photograph of a house near Green Street, London E7, and textile embellishments found in a South Asian textile shop in Green Street. By Helen Scalway.

Collage constructed from a photograph of a house near Green Street, London E7

Collage constructed from a photograph of a house near Green Street, London E7, and textile embellishments found in a South Asian textile shop in Green Street. By Helen Scalway.

Carrier bags by Helen Scalway

Ghostly evocations of nineteenth century houses in the Green Street area with equally insubstantially rendered ornament derived from textiles in the local South Asian shops. Each element haunts the other in a series of reciprocal ‘returns’, suggesting the multi-layered nature of memory in such a cosmopolitan site as Green Street.

Carrier Bag and Projection by Helen Scalway

Photograph of a master embroiderer in a workshop in Varanasi, India, projected onto a giant ‘carrier bag’ and a smaller one with drawing (Helen Scalway) based on a nineteenth century house in the Green Street area with ornament derived from textiles in the local South Asian shops. The bobbins in this image of layered places come from an old British textile mill and contain silk thread, probably made from South Asian imports.

Carrier bags by Nilesh Mistry and Samar Abbas

Carrier bags by Nilesh Mistry and Samar Abbas

Golden Trainer Carrier Bag by Nilesh Mistry

Nilesh Mistry’s carrier bags were all on the theme: ‘India Loves Gold.’ His ‘Golden Trainer’ design shows a contemporary designer item interpreted through the traditional South Asian passion for gold.

Circling Coppers by Samar Abbas

Samar Abbas’s design for a carrier bag exploits the geometry of Islamic ornament with a contemporary British motif, the ‘kettling’ copper surrounding a ‘suspect’.

Carrier bags by Sumi Perera

Sumi Perera’s carrier bags were laser cut. She added luggage labels documenting the various voyages she and her family had made. The laser cut-outs became fragile ‘continent confetti’ suggesting a migrant instability to the world itself.

Continent Confetti by Sumi Perera

Continent Confetti by Sumi Perera.

Carrier Bag for a Bridal Textile by Anjana Patel

Anjana Patel produced a sculptural bag exploiting various layers, exploring the theme of veiling and ornament.

Chart chest

The Royal Geographical Society is a place full of map chests and chart chests: this chest echoes others in the Society’s building which is just up the road from the V&A.

Memories by Jagmohan Bangani

Jagmohan Bangani spent time studying in England. During his stay he poignantly expressed his distance from his Indian home through works based on the repetitions of Hindu mantras, bringing back the rituals of his Indian village by, in his own words, ‘chanting colours with the help of brushes and paint’.

Memories by Punam Sharma

Like Jagmohan Bangani, Punam Sharma came to Britain for a lengthy stay. She also works on the theme of memory, using paper pulp to create semi-opaque, veiled images which she describes as evoking the elusiveness of her memories.

Textile motif for a British sari

Sudanese Nagat El-Mahi, now resident in London, created a textile motif for a British sari using various visual components: images derived from a cobra, dynamic diagonal lines derived from the Swiss Re building in St Mary Axe, London, (the Gherkin), and the reds and golds traditional to the saris or ‘toabs’ of Sudan.

South Asian British Textile Shop

This work exploits the cool, quantifying qualities of an architectural plan by using such a ‘plan’ as a structure to hold the unquantifiable desires, reconstructions of memory and presentations of identity contained in a characteristic South Asian textile shop in London.

A drawing developing the idea of the shop as a place of display

A drawing developing the idea of the shop as a place of display and unattainable/unassuageable desires: the necklaces in their glassy display case become unreachable stars and planets. By Helen Scalway

South Asian British Textile Shop

Fitting rooms are often mere cubicles but this one has expanded to house a mirror reminiscent of a cinema screen in which reflections suggest Hollywood/Bollywood glamour in an endless play of labyrinthine desire.

South Asian British Textile Shop

What might the ‘storage room’ at the back of a Green Street textile shop imply? Artists speak of ‘figure’ in a work, that which stands out from the ‘ground’. This drawing uses a kind of analogy: what is it that constitutes our ‘ground’ as people, our sense of ‘belonging’ inconspicuously in a place? I have used the words ‘mother’, ‘mother tongue’, ‘homeland’, in the different languages spoken in and around Green Street, such as Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, as well as English. They have been produced by rubbing so that they rise up through the paper from below. Applied to the top of the paper are perspectival renderings of storage boxes, fragile containers of the uncontainable, imposed on it from above and destined to fail as containers.

South Asian British Textile Shop

This drawing also explores the Storage Room. Two ways of comprehending space interweave with each other. A simple rendering of the outline of a sea container of the kind used for shipping goods is rendered in Western conventional perspective, a drawing system used from the Renaissance onwards, suggesting illusionistic space which it would take linear time to traverse. Across this floats an embroidered fragment of Islamic geometric ornament, capable of endless repetition, suggesting the multi-centred endlessness of the divine, outside all time. The hanging threads tangle the drawing, the two ways of envisioning space.

Museum Sketch

Museum Sketch by Helen Scalway.

Mini-museum

A mini museum faced the ‘shop’ elements in the Moving Patterns exhibition. It housed various works exploring nineteenth century cultures of collecting and display: it was a ‘museum’ evoking some underlying museological issues.

Mini-museum (close-up)

The mini museum showed various items demonstrating different ways of looking: some deconstructed pages of Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament: some newly made books offering ‘reframings’ of textiles and heraldic motifs found in and on the V&A building: several ‘dioramas’ derived from nineteenth century ‘Pollock theatres’, etc.

Title page from the book ‘Some of Albert’s Beasts at the V&A’

This work recontextualises some of the ornamental heraldic animals, emblems of ancient hierarchical power, found on and in the V&A buildings. It juxtaposes these with various South Asian textiles, representing some of the treasures from colonies which contributed so much to Britain’s wealth and prestige in the nineteenth century.

This image places the statue of Prince Albert, which stands above the main entrance to the V&A, against an unprincely pink-spotted muslin found in the Museum’s South Asian textile archive.

A page from the book ‘Some of Albert’s Beasts at the V&A’

A page from the book 'Some of Albert's Beasts at the V&A' by Helen Scalway.

A page from ‘Some of Albert’s Beasts at the V&A’

A page from the book 'Some of Albert's Beasts at the V&A' by Helen Scalway.

A page from ‘Some of Albert’s Beasts at the V&A’

A page from the book 'Some of Albert's Beasts at the V&A' by Helen Scalway.

Deconstructing ‘The Grammar of Ornament'

Owen Jones’s nineteenth century pattern collection, ‘The Grammar of Ornament’, sets out small squares and rectangles of pattern from other cultures, torn from their contexts, in stable, symmetrical arrangements, as though they were specimens in a museum cabinet. This work shreds and tangles some pages of The Grammar of Ornament, undoing Jones’s imposed symmetries and implying a more unruly mass of material whose connections go in all directions.

Collecting Plants, Collecting Textiles

This image suggests that pattern collecting such as Owen Jones’s (and he was not alone in collecting ornament) are at the heart of nineteenth century cultures of collection and display. It juxtaposes a South Asian textile from the archive at the V&A with an early nineteenth century botanical drawing of an Indian ‘lotus’, from the Fleming Collection in the Botany Library at the Natural History Museum.

From the mid eighteenth century onwards collections of all sorts of material objects were formed: collections of fossils, shells, preserved animals and anatomical specimens, insects, plants – all manner of things - including ornamental motifs. To identify, classify and display a collection was a way of gaining knowledge of its contents. This in turn could translate into the economic exploitation of such items, and so into wealth and ultimately, power.

Textile Butterfly Collection

Nineteenth century collectors created systematic displays of butterflies in cabinets and boxes. However the patterns of each butterfly in this collecting box are derived from textile samples gathered by the nineteenth century collector, John Forbes Watson. This work implies that such pattern collecting was part of a larger culture of collecting and display.

Forbes Watson’s sample books are housed in the V&A archive.

Butterfly Textile Factory

Here the textile butterflies find themselves in a new and unnatural habitat, the factory, and have all turned soot black. In the mid nineteenth century, South Asian textile patterns were exploited by the cotton mill owners of Lancashire, whose engines blackened the cities of the north.

Diorama: Ceramic Staircase at the V&A

The last four works were all inspired by the nineteenth century interest in creating illusionistic ‘other worlds’, by such means as dioramas and toy Pollock theatres. This combined with this artists’s desire to disturb apparently stable framing devices which tell us where and how to look. Here the grand Ceramic Staircase, an imposing and authoritative feature at the V&A, is disrupted by a (hugely enlarged) embroidered flower on a textile currently shown in the V&A’s South Asian collection in the Nehru Gallery.

Diorama: National Art Library with Bursting Ornament

A diorama in which the dignified architecture of the National Art Library with its suggestion of a framing of authoritative knowledge, is challenged by an ornamental flower on a textile currently shown in the V&A’s South Asian collection in the Nehru Gallery. Where did the wealth to create such a library come from? Largely from the colonies with their ravishing textile cultures.

Diorama: In Storage

The V&A’s great collection of South Asian textiles is stored in a severely functional, rational system of storage units such as might also be used in a different institution to house medical or legal records. This essentially modernist system, whose rationale is efficiency, is disturbed here by the eruption of an exquisite piece of nineteenth century beetle wing embroidery housed in one of the units, but coming from a culture dominated by other imperatives than the ‘purely’ rational. Ideas of the return of something repressed are also at work in this piece: there is a haunting of the functional storage units by the quite different world of their contents.

Diorama: Institutions Produce ‘Knowledge'

In this conceptual work the Ceramic Staircase leads into an artist’s studio in an art college, Wimbledon College of Art where an artist, herself based in an academic Geography Department (at Royal Holloway, University of London) was engaged on a residency concerning an archive of photographs of South Asian textiles and their conditions of manufacture, working in co-operation with the V&A. This artist, in fact. From such co-operation between institutions it is supposed and hoped that ‘knowledge’ or understanding will be generated. This artwork suggests the institutional framing of the archive and seeks to reference the question: how do such knowledge institutions as art colleges, museums, universities, acting as sites of knowledge-production, affect the ‘knowledges’ or understandings which are produced? Perhaps it’s the knottiest question raised in this series of works.