Along the Silk Road: Silk Ikat Weaving in Uzbekistan

Jan 2007

Report by Judy Treddigan

On a grey wet evening in January we entered the comfortable senior common room at the Royal College of Art to be transported on a magic carpet along the Silk Road to Uzbekistan. There, engulfed in colourful silks of unimaginable hues and patterns, we were introduced to Philippa Watkins, Senior Tutor Woven Textiles, at the Royal College of Art.

It was her extraordinary beautiful collection of textiles that she had bought along to share with us.

At the end of the Soviet period and the Communist ideology of collective working Uzbekistan regained its independence. The textile weavers and dyers of the region had difficulty with the new political and financial environment and had lost many of the traditional craft and business skills.

Philippa had been invited to visit the region by The British Concil to lend her expertise to help re-kindle and inspire the traditional skills of the weavers and dyers and develop a new entrepreneurial spirit for their colourful textile crafts that had had such a long and illustrious tradition. The focus of the exercise was to create textiles and contemporary fashion for local consumption and export to the West.

Philippa’s illustrated talk wove a fascinating story of the fading, crumbling beauty of Central Asia with its exotic architecture, decorative arts and textiles. This visual feast was interwoven with an erudite explanation of the political and economic turmoil of Uzbekistan and the Mafia that has replaced Communism and, in its turn, the effect it had on developing the new textile and fashion workshops. Despite all these seemingly insurmountable problems, under Philippa and her team’s inspiration the workshops started to produce ravishing textiles and fashions garments again, not only using the technical and artistic mastery of traditional craft skills but updating them, where appropriate, for consumption both at home and abroad.

To our immense relief Philippa explained with great patients all the complexities of Ikat dying and weaving. It is a complex resist technique, tie dying the warp threads in up to seven colours, each time the tied warps being taken from the loom to be dyed and returned to the loom for the Master designer to indicate where the next tying for resist will take place for the next colour. Finally, back on the loom the ties are removed before being woven with the weft thread. (There is also double Ikat, but for Uzbekistan single Ikat is used for the textiles) We were then able to see in the slides, these ravishing textiles used in contemporary fashion in a show masterminded by Philippa and her team.

Many questions were asked regarding the yarns used, which are mainly silk, and whether the dyes were natural or chemical, both are, in fact, used. The dyer, we were told, would use what ever he could find! Philippa was generous in sharing her knowledge and expertise in answering the many queries from the floor.

Delegates were then invited to look at the many garments and textiles on display and buy them or just admire the immense skill in creating such beauty.

The evening was masterminded by Sylvia Ayton in collaboration with Philippa Watkins; we are indebted to both for such a magical, erudite exposition of the complexities of the political and economic difficulties of the region but also for sharing with us the exquisite beauty of the country, the textiles that are created in such a politically unstable climate and with such basic equipment and facilities on the Silk Road in Uzbekistan.