I love to explore textures and colours in my textile work, and I try to make sure I’ve got my camera handy to snap anything interesting. Below are a few of the images that caught my eye in Oxford: colour combinations in lichen-covered bark, forms in tree sap, and mosaic reflections in windows. 
On my trip to Rajasthan in February we visited a lot of palaces and temples as well as seeing craft producers. Everywhere we went there was fascinating architecture and amazing decoration. The Maharajas who lived in the palaces were not into minimalist interior design, every surface was covered in rich and sumptuous decoration. This surface ornamentation varied from the breathtakingly beautiful to the frankly tasteless but it was never dull. My camera should have been red-hot with the number of shots I took. The few photographs I present to you here are just a taste of the ornamentation found in a number of Rajasthan palaces.
Deprived of real power by the British, the Indian princes put much of their
great wealth into building these deliberately impressive palaces and filling
them with extravagant objects. It is not really clear who was meant to be
impressed, whether the subjects of these princes, their foreign overlords, or if they
were simply trying to convince themselves of their own greatness, but there was
certainly a lot of effort put into the enterprise.
While these palaces do have a distinctive style of their own, I was struck by how many of the decorative motifs used were not particularly Indian in feeling and were in fact vaguely familiar. It took a while before I realised that a good deal of the decoration could have been taken directly from “The Grammar of Ornament” by Owen Jones. The style of decoration in these palaces appears to be drawn, not just from the Indian tradition but from a Victorian British aesthetic as well.
Owen Jones was a Victorian architect and designer who published his major work “The Grammar of Ornament” in 1856. This classic work was a great influence on successive generations of designers and provided both inspiration and source material for major Arts and Crafts figures such as William Morris and William De Morgan. The book is still available in print today.
“The Grammar of Ornament” was an investigation into the design motifs of varied cultures and periods but Owen, by a process of selection and subtle transformation, managed to transform all his sources until they looked unmistakeably Victorian.
I love shopping at outdoor markets and places where shops have street displays. Even the most mundane fruit and vegetables can look much more colourful and inviting there than they ever do in a pristine supermarket display. When I travel abroad I particularly enjoy wandering around local markets and taking in all the colour. Here are a few photographs from my trips to India, plus an old favourite from China.
Outdoor market in Jaipur
Local street market in Rajasthan
Umbrellas for sale lying beside a market stall
Stall selling Festival flowers – South India
Stall selling Festival dyes – South India
Beautiful dried fruit display – Dunhuang, China
A little while ago I posted some photos of doors from Rajasthan, India, and tonight I thought I would show you some pictures of very different doors.
Ping Yao is a small Chinese city situated several hundred miles south-west of Beijing. This ancient walled city is notable for its old buildings and for having the only remaining Ming dynasty city fortifications in China that are broadly intact. The area encompassed by the city walls has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ping Yao was once a wealthy banking centre and has many fine buildings, both domestic and public. A good number of these have now been restored and are open to tourists.
Street entrance to a once wealthy Ping Yao mansion
In traditional Han-Chinese homes, the outer door from the street does not lead into a building but into a courtyard. Members of an extended family would live in different buildings around this courtyard. The residences of wealthy families would have a succession of inner courtyards, each with rooms leading off. These photographs were taken in the unrestored parts of the city, a few show the entrances to grand buildings but others are from very modest homes. All bear marks of the passage of time and many decades of neglect.
Age and Neglect
Unlike private homes, the street doors of shops open directly into the building. These shop doors typically featured a lot of intricate carving.
Door to a restaurant
A new door in traditional style being fitted in Ping Yao
Today, as Ping Yao develops as a tourist destination, there are many buildings being restored. From what I could see this was being done well in a technical sense, with the use of traditional methods, materials and designs being strictly enforced. This is in stark contrast to much “restoration” in China, which often draws more on fiction than local tradition for inspiration. Even when accurately restored, however, I fear that much is being lost. Those who want to feel the age and history of a place like Ping Yao might have to go soon before these wonderful time-weary buildings are replaced by perfect modern facsimiles.
Last weekend we made the long journey to pick up our daughter from university for the last time, and once more we had to perform the conjuring trick of fitting far too much into far too small a car.
Over the last four years we have grown to love the city of Oxford very much and we shall miss having an excuse to visit!
Mansfield College
Oxford (if you can escape the tourists) is a delightful city, by turns serenely beautiful, laughably pretentious, dreamily nostalgic, and always wonderfully eccentric. In this post I’ve included photos that I feel best represent Oxford – if you get the chance you should definitely visit for yourselves!
Magdalen Bridge
On my Indian trip in February, we visited a village near Jodhpur where all the women in one extended family were producing very fine hand-embroidered fabrics. The pieces made were mostly large and very intricate, many taking weeks to complete. Learning a little about how these women produced such neat and painstaking work was very interesting.
Most embroidery was done on cotton cloth, ranging from moderately heavyweight fabric to the finest semi-transparent muslins. Silk is also used to a lesser extent. Stitching was mainly done using gold, silver and white threads. Most of the fabric used was white in colour but some work is also done on bright materials. On many pieces they also stitched sequins into the design, while some other work featured intricate beadwork. Most of the embroidered fabrics are sold for use as bedcovers, though some tourists want them as curtains or wall hangings.
The big secret to their process was that the fabric is first printed with very faint guidelines which the women then embroider over. The printing is done from woodblocks made by one of the men from the same family. The women did a lot of the work with the cloth stretched between two bars on a horizontal frame and worked on one small section at a time. They gradually rolled the cloth from one bar to the other so that they could reach all parts of it.
Hand embroidery using a horizontal frame
Another product the women were making was hand-embroidered uppers for traditional Indian slippers. Slippers of this type are widely seen but the embroidery work produced by these very talented ladies was particularly fine.
Hand embroidered upper for a slipper
Below is a slipper of the type being embroidered (this one was embroidered by someone else.)
Indian embroidered slipper
There may have been no raindrops on my roses the last time I posted on this soggy subject but there certainly are now. With constant rain and gale force winds all the flowers in my garden have been given a real battering. Yet even depressing weather can yield some beauty and when it did clear up a bit today I went out with my camera and got some more nice shots of pretty droplets:
The Achemilla delights as always:
All I need now are some “whiskers on kittens”:
I find doors interesting. The door to a home marks a border; a dividing line between outside and inside; between “ours” and “theirs.” Old doors that have seen a lot of history have a character all of their own. They can say a lot about the sort of people who have lived there.
When I was in Rajasthan, India earlier this year I photographed a lot of doors. Here is a selection of them.
This ancient rusting iron door was amazing!
The rusting iron door-frame
And of course, with a door there is always the possibility of a glimpse inside.
In another post soon I will show you some doors from China.
These are just a few photographs taken on a walk down a little country lane near our house.
My recent posts showing photographs of Cornish mornings proved very popular, so here are some pictures showing North Cornwall at the end of the day.
Widemouth Bay is situated just south of Bude and faces directly west. From here there is nothing but ocean until you hit the east coast of North America!
While in Rajasthan early this year we went to visit the weaver’s village of Salawas, where the craftsmen make traditional Durries (woven rugs). There we saw the master rugmaker Roopraj Prajapati at the Roopraj Durry Udhyog Cooperative.
The Durry (or Durrie) is woven in such a way as to make it fully reversible. They are commonly woven in cotton but the craftsmen also use silk, wool, goat hair and camel hair. The weavers work on a flat loom and only use a blade and a pick as tools. A wide range of traditional designs are produced, most patterns deriving from the Marwar culture to which the villagers belong.
The last time I visited my family in Hong Kong we went on a ferry trip to visit Tung Ping Chau Island. This tiny island, situated in the far north-east corner of the Hong Kong territory, is famed for its unusual geology and is part of a UNESCO Global Geopark. The island itself is nearly all Country Park and is situated in the Tung Ping Chau Marine Park.
The park’s many paths, overgrown with orchids and the spectacularly eroded rocks are incredibly beautiful. However, I found that the most striking feature of the island was the deserted houses of the former villagers, which are gradually being swallowed up by the undergrowth.
Tung Ping Chau is famed for its unusual sedimetary rocks
The island once had a thriving fishing and farming community of over 3,000 people, but now it has no permanent residents, as everyone has left for a better life in Hong Kong’s urban jungle. The only well-maintained buildings to be seen are connected with the tourist trade.
Everyone has left for Hong Kong a few miles away
I found the sight of the slowly decaying homes to be a little melancholy yet strangely beautiful.
Whilst in India with my friends, we visited a few different craft producers in the state of Rajasthan, so this is the first of a series of posts showing the craftspeople at work.
In Sanganer, on the outskirts of Jaipur, we visited a traditional hand paper making factory. Here we saw paper still being made, one sheet at a time, by dipping a mold into a vat of cotton pulp (this is very different stuff from the wood pulp paper we use everyday). This traditional craft ceased production in England in 1987, but it continues in a number of countries around the world.
The paper is made from cotton pulp, which is a traditional material that produces very strong yet soft paper. The material is sourced as offcuts from a t-shirt factory.
This pulping machine breaks the cotton scraps down into small fluffy pieces.
The pulp is then transferred to a “Hollander” beater which further breaks down the pulp and blends it with water until it is the right consistency. This type of machine would have been in common use in Britain over 100 years ago!
The workers produce a new sheet of paper by dipping a mold into a vat of pulp – getting an even sheet is a highly skilled job.
The new sheet is lifted off the mold and stacked.
A stack of freshly molded paper. This batch has a scattering of rose petals embedded in each sheet.
These freshly harvested roses provide the petals that are embedded in the paper.
Each petal is separated from the roses by hand!
This is the press used to squeeze water out of the newly made sheets.
Final drying is achieved by hanging the sheets individually from wires in the roof space.
Each sheet of paper is checked for quality before being carefully stacked.
In the UK we have all been lamenting about the miserable weather in April. However, one positive about the cool month is that my tulips have flowered for weeks longer than normal.
Have you ever really looked hard inside a tulip flower? They are amazing! Many have unexpected touches of contrasting colour at the base, and when backlight shines through the petals the hues are incredibly intense. Here are a few shots I took this week:
Over Easter, I visited a fantastic exhibition of Howard Hodgkin’s Indian Miniatures at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This fabulous show included many works by the court painters of Rajasthan, including some lovely paintings of elephants. I actually visited Rajasthan while I was in India this year, and saw images of elephants everywhere. Though the photos I took of elephants aren’t all great works of art, they’re still good fun.
“Elephants Fighting” detail. Collection Howard Hodgkin
Wai-Yuk Kennedy Textile Art 