By V. Geetha

Travelling Patterns is the latest in a line of books that engage with textiles and textile art. It is a unique visual assemblage—in which pattern-making travels from textile to paper, from the decorative to the narrative, and from one context to another.

Indonesian trickster tale featuring Kanchil the mouse deer, illustrated in the Mata-Ni-Pachedi style from Gujarat.

By Gita Wolf

The connection of skill and labour to art making has always interested us. We’re curious not only about the aesthetic and philosophical aspects of traditional art, but equally in its connection to artisanal practices, the craft that goes into giving it a physical form. In the case of Mata-Ni-Pachedi, this involves painting, block-printing and dyeing techniques which are painstaking, requiring skill and experience. This kind of artisanal knowledge is profound and priceless, but it is not valued highly, and seen more as a sequence of repetitive tasks learned through apprenticeship. Instead of holding artisanal practices against the mirror of industrial manufacture — or seeing them as distinct from art-making — we’d like to connect them intrinsically to the creative process.

By Gita Wolf & V. Geetha

Like for so many others, John Berger was an inspirational figure for us, a long while before Tara was born or even thought of. It was from him that we learnt to look at and think about art in a way that no one had taught us before. As young feminists, his ideas became a kind of foundation, a place from which it was possible to set out and look at things differently.