Impossible Gardens

A chintz Palampore for the European market depicting a Tree of Life 258 x 214 cm.
Coromandel Coast, South India, late 18th/ early 19th Century

Islamic and Indian Art Auction 2015 Bonhams 

My interest in patterns started in my childhood bath.

We had a typical 1970s avocado bathroom — the walls were covered in square wall tiles with a corner motif that mirrored itself horizontally and vertically. As a five- or six-year-old, I must have spent a lot of time staring at them because I noticed something I remember to this day. The two lower reflections looked unmistakably like a devil's head. The two upper ones looked like angels. The same shape, read completely differently depending on which way up you looked at it. I was fascinated — and I think that early discovery, that pattern can convey meaning and that meaning shifts with perspective, is behind everything I do now.

Palampore Archive Fabric 

Warner House

When the local Binns department store closed down in the late eighties, my mum decided she would open a deli. Mum had an entrepreneurial streak and a strong work ethic. The deli had an upstairs, and that was where the real interest was for me. Upstairs, she sold fents.
Fents were three-metre lengths of interior fabric with minor faults — small flaws in the weave, a misaligned print repeat, a snag on the selvedge — that meant they couldn't be sold as perfect. She sourced them through fabric merchants who handled the surplus stock from design houses like Colefax and Fowler, Osborne and Little, and Warner's. Mum sold the fabrics at a fraction of the usual retail price. Customers would climb the stairs and find themselves surrounded by pattern.
I would help out upstairs, sorting and folding, and that is where my education in pattern began. The late eighties was the moment when chintz was having its great revival, and the tree of life was everywhere — climbing across linens and cottons in soft greens and faded reds, scattered with birds and flowers, descended from a tradition I had no idea was already three thousand years old.
This design above is from Warner House. 'Palampore' itself has its roots in the Coromandel Coast trade of the mid-seventeenth century. It would have been entirely at home on Mum's shelves. I didn't have the language for it then, but I was already absorbing something about the way pattern conveys history.

Detail from the chintz palampore above.

Late 18th/ early 19th Century

The original palampores — the painted and resist-dyed cottons produced in India for the European export market — are extraordinary objects. To look closely at them is to see imagination running slightly ahead of accuracy. Multiple species of flower bloom on the same branch, botanically impossible but visually abundant. Butterfly wings carry invented markings. At the base of the great central tree, rocky mounds teem with deer, strange creatures, and invented fauna that seems to belong to no particular natural world. There is a freedom in them that openly delights in its own making.

They were also extraordinarily labour intensive. The finest examples involved multiple resist processes, hand-painting, and mordant dyeing — each stage requiring precision, and the whole requiring months. That density of labour shows. When you look at the detail in the best surviving pieces, you are looking at accumulated attention on a grand scale.

Looking at their beauty, you also have to remember the conditions in which they were made. The makers, working under the monopoly conditions imposed by European trading companies, had little say in what they were paid or who they could sell to. The beauty and the coercion are both real, and they don't cancel each other out.

Above and below: details of a palampore of painted and dyed cotton chintz, Coromandel Coast, ca. 1750-1780
Height: 315cm Width: 335cm V&A Collection Given by G.P.Baker

What I find equally fascinating is the cultural conversation embedded in the cloth itself. These textiles were made in India, informed by Persian and Mughal traditions, shaped by Chinese influences arriving through trade, and then further adapted to satisfy European and American tastes — each market wanting something slightly different, each iteration leaving its trace in the design. Look at this extraordinary example that places a Chinese woman, rendered in a distinctly Chinese pictorial manner, within a composition that is otherwise entirely Indian in its inspiration. It is a collision of visual languages, and it works — partly because the tree of life is a motif so ancient and so widely shared that it can absorb almost anything into its branches.
That adaptability is part of what makes it endure.

Furnishing fabric, printed, British, c. 1937, Morton Sundour Fabrics Ltd., from “Cumberland Prints” series, “Tree of Life”, from the “Harry Wearne Collection”, Indian style tree, flowers and birds. V&A Collection

I have been thinking about trees of life a great deal recently, because of one of my sitters for Drawn to the Boro.
She is a woman with a poet's sensibility and a direct way of speaking, and she told me her story with more curiosity than sadness. She has lived a branching life — roots she hadn't known were there until later in life, paths chosen and paths set aside, a vocation that turned in unexpected directions. When I began thinking about how to bring all of this into a single image, the tree of life seemed inevitable. It seemed a fitting motif to visualise a life that has grown in many directions — roots that were hidden, branches that were chosen, some that were pruned, all of it living and flourishing.

"Vegetable Tree" is a variation on the tree of life theme that Josef Frank often used. 1943-1945

https://www.svenskttenn.com

I began this newsletter in a 1970s bathroom, looking at tiles that showed me angels and devils in the same shape. I find myself ending it thinking about a woman who discovered, later in her life, that she was more complex than she had been told — that her tree had roots running somewhere she couldn't have imagined.
Pattern has always been where meaning lives and grows from. The palampore makers knew this, too. They put impossible gardens on cloth — flowers that don't grow together with creatures that don't exist — and generations of people have shared in that delight.

Ancient Egyptian wall painting depicting birds in an acacia tree from the Tomb of Khnumhotep II at Beni Hasan. Approximately 4000 years old.