Map of patterns - Palestine and the impossibility of edges

Here is a picture of me in the West Bank town of Ramallah in 1993. I still have fond memories of my time there and the friends I made.

I've used a piece of indigo-dyed fabric to cover Palestine and Israel and I've embroidered it with a cross stitch pattern copied from a Palestian dress given to me for my 18th birthday.

Palestinian embroiders have a very illustrious history and culture: every region has it's own particular stitches and patterns. The women of Bethlehem area learned the couching stitch from the Crusaders while the women in Jaffa, working in the fields and orchards, used patterns inspired by nature, like the cypress tree. The 'Cypress Tree' occurs in many guises - with or without branches, with different shaped branches, even up side down. (I think you can see this upside down 'Cypress Tree' pattern on my dress)

The women of the villages that remain inside Israel tend to no longer embroider their costumes; but many of the women of the West Bank and Gaza living in refugee camps, especially those of village origin - still embroider their dresses, now as a way of earning an income more than for their own personal use.

The women in Ramallah use a remarkable stitch that is precisely the same when looked at from the front and from the back. You can see from my dress that the work looks very beautiful - even on the wrongside.

I have a great interest in wrongside sewing and am nearly always more interested in 'the back' than in 'the front.' This is because I feel the 'the back' or 'the wrongside' tells me so much more than 'the front' or 'the rightside.'

For example - how the makers fingers travelled, how her mind moved - consciously or unconsciously, where the hidden joins or mends were made...the wrongside gives me clues about how a whole piece of cloth has been divided and then fitted together again and most importantly for me - how the edges have been joined together and made sense of.

This special Ramallah stitch gives nothing away and that is its particular magic.

Map of patterns - Slavery and the price of cotton

The brown fabric is cloth I block printed to show the connections between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. These kinds of cloths are called Indiennes de Traite or 'trade' cloths and were printed in France towards the end of the 18th century. They were traded with African chiefs for slaves, who were then shipped to the New World, to work and die on sugar and cotton plantations.

The cotton was then shipped back to Europe where it was milled, some of it travelling back to Africa in exchange for more human lives.

Many of the motifs on this cloth were made explicitly to suit the tribal chiefs for whom they were intended - red and black was a particularly popular colour combination.

From Senegal, I discovered an indigo-dyed textile with a circular design still known as 'slave shackles.' I made the sample I have used on the map by tightly folding and stiching cotton cloth before putting it in the dye bath. It is not as vivid as the original, but I have used it to cover parts of West Africa. (You can see it in my first post 'Map of patterns - Wax print and Blaudruk).

The history of cotton and slavery is an open book: the greed for cotton in the 19th century was a bit like our obsessive need for oil. Cotton made fortunes, created empires and was bought at any price. In America itself, the price of a slave actually closely tracked the price of cotton - generally the price of a slave was thought to be 10,000 times the price of cotton.

By the second half of the 19th century slavery was illegal in England, but around 80% of the cotton being processed in British mills was produced by slaves. And the legacy of cotton and slavery lives on: much of the cotton we still wear is produced by impoverished share-croppers and child labourers.

My friend Erica Tate told me how once refused to pay to enter the Tate Gallery, because she considered that her and her slave ancestors were honorary Tates and had already contributed enough. Not far from where Erica lives in Clapham, I found this embroidered island of Jamaica. Although I've covered it with trade cloth, you can still look underneath and see the names and places reclaimed by Jamaicans and lovingly embroidered by this unknown hand.