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In 2025 I travelled to India to begin learning Kalamkari, a textile painting tradition with roots stretching back centuries.

My interest in Kalamkari emerged from a practical question. How do we make textiles in a time shaped by climate change, resource constraints and the need to move beyond extractive forms of production?

Like many textile artists of my generation, I was educated within material traditions shaped by the industrial era. During my studies in textile art between 2009 and 2012, synthetic dyes, industrial pigments and petroleum-based binders were largely taken for granted. These materials made many things possible, but they also reflected a wider system of production built on fossil energy and global supply chains.

As questions of sustainability became increasingly central to my work, I found myself looking both backwards and outwards. Through research in historical archives, including studies of nineteenth-century banners and earlier textile traditions, I became interested in techniques developed before synthetic materials became dominant. This search eventually led me to India.

What I encountered there was not simply a craft tradition, but living communities of practitioners carrying material knowledge that has survived industrialisation, globalisation and enormous social change. The term artisan is sometimes used too lightly, but it points towards something important: skilled makers whose knowledge is embedded in practice, transmitted across generations and closely connected to local materials, environments and economies.

As a visitor, I approach Kalamkari as a student rather than an expert. Learning such traditions carries responsibilities as well as opportunities. It raises questions about cultural exchange, authorship, economic inequality and the relationship between contemporary art and living craft communities.

For me, learning Kalamkari is therefore not only a technical exercise. It is part of a broader attempt to understand how material knowledge might contribute to more sustainable futures, and how artists in the global North can enter into relationships of learning that acknowledge and support the communities from which that knowledge comes.

This ongoing process has also informed the development of Trust in Humanity, an initiative exploring cultural exchange, craft traditions, agriculture and knowledge systems across different parts of the world. Rather than treating artisans as remnants of the past, I am interested in the possibility that some of the knowledge carried by these communities may become increasingly relevant in the future.