Textiles naturales

Maison et Objet is a major trade fair held in Paris twice a year, in September and January.  It´s the place to connect with broad trends and where shops, galleries, designers, and manufacturers go to see, sell, buy textiles – furniture – interiors – worldwide.  There was a strong international presence in the fair and in amongst the hundreds of stands, in the Ateliers de France, section, I discovered stands by a good number of Galician Spanish craft workshops based not far from where I have my studio in north Spain.  Orders are taken at the fair by shops and work is then either sent on from stock, or made-to-order.   But there is more to Maison & Objet than just commerce as the images of the Burkina Faso weaving culture project by Save Our Skills shows.

Fabrics with a very special story from Burkina Faso.  Save Our Skills is an ambitious social project which aims to support traditional weavers and promote sustainable, organic agriculture with the re-introduction of organic cotton as an alternative to Monsanto cotton.

It was a rare priveledge to be introduced to Masa Dembele, master weaver, who was demonstrating with the portable 2 shaft looms that are traditional in his area.  I was amazed to see that the weave structure he was working with was very similar in some ways to the traditional Spanish overshot, (the pattern yarn “floats” over the surface of the fabric and the fabric is given stability with a ground weave in tabby).  But the designs are very different.  Those from Burkina Faso are more complex and not necessarily symmetrical because the weave method is more manually-controlled.

The loss of traditional regional weaving skills is, ironically, as acute in north Spain as it is in Burkina Faso, and the search for new ways forward is as difficult in Europe as it is in Africa.  There is also the added difficulty that export is not as obvious a solution:  wages and the cost of living in Spain are of course European, so it is even more difficult to make manual skills pay through the sale of work.   In Burkina Faso, traditional organic cotton cultivation has almost disappeared – and in Galicia, north Spain, it is the same with linen.   Overshot weaving in Galicia, north Spain, known as repaso nuevo, used traditionally for woven coverlets, has also become obsolete and there are virtually no traditional weavers left – and few younger weavers who have learned from them.

Thank you to Karin, Désiré and Denzel of Save Our Skills and the British European Design Group.  And of course anakiéh to Masa and Désiré.

Eleanor Pritchard´s elegantly-simple blankets are 100% wool and woven in Wales and are particular favourites of mine.   Eleanor is an accomplished weaver and designer.  She designs on a dobby loom in her studio and the textiles are woven by machine looms.