What the Thread Carries

In 1975, the Pathet Lao took Vientiane. The revolution moved quickly. People who had lived in the capital for generations found themselves on the streets, and some of them were carrying textiles - heritage cloths that had been in their families for years, often for generations, woven in silk and cotton in patterns inseparable from the communities that made them. They were selling what they could.

Patricia Cheesman was working in Laos at the time, on a UN ceramics development project. She was not looking for textiles. But on a street in Vientiane, she bought a red silk healing cloth from a woman who needed to sell it, and something shifted. The cloth was beautiful in a way she had not encountered before - not the beauty of design alone, but the beauty of a thing made with knowledge she did not yet have. She spent the next decade finding out what that knowledge was.

That research took her across Thailand and Laos, into villages whose weaving traditions had never been documented, to communities where women carried the techniques of their grandmothers without having a name for what they knew. In 1985, Patricia was invited to lecture at Chiang Mai University. She built her studio and dye-shop at the foot of Doi Suthep Mountain, on land planted with the materials she had learned to use: two varieties of indigo, and roots, barks, and seeds sustainably collected from the forests around her.

Studio Naenna was founded in 1988.

The craft at the centre of the studio is weft ikat - an ancient technique of the Lao and Thai people. Ikat demands foresight: the pattern is not drawn onto the finished cloth but dyed into the yarn before weaving begins, bundle by bundle, so that the weaver must imagine the cloth entirely before it exists. To make a mistake at this stage is to unmake weeks of work.

Khun Viroy is the master ikat weaver who built the weaving community. Born in Surin province in northeast Thailand, she learned the Thai-Khmer weft ikat technique from her mother as a teenager, was invited by Patricia to join the first workshop in 1988, and has since trained more than forty weavers in the villages of Chomtong district, south of Chiang Mai. She still works, still weaves, still teaches.

The colours come from the land. Studio Naenna's indigo vats are more than twenty-five years old - not containers of dye but living cultures, maintained the way you maintain something that has earned its permanence. Khun Saeng, a Karen master weaver who has worked alongside Patricia for over two decades, tends the vats as carefully as she tends the threads on her backstrap loom. The blues that result cannot be reproduced by synthetic means. 

What Patricia began with a red silk cloth on a Vientiane street, Lamorna Cheesman - her daughter, now the studio's manager - carries forward. The weavers work from home, in their villages, on their own time. Their daughters are attending university.