Maryam Omar couldn’t help but cry as she walked into the Weaving Poems exhibition at last year’s Design Doha.
The British-Afghan artist had spent months designing the carpets on show, but because they were woven thousands of kilometres away by women artisans in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan region, she had never seen the finished works in person. She trusted the weavers’ craftsmanship, but so much could have gone wrong in the distance.
“As soon as I entered, I started crying,” Omar recalls. “I was so overwhelmed with joy. It was more than what I had imagined.”
Now on show at Sotheby’s in London, Weaving Poems is organised by Turquoise Mountain. The non-profit organisation is dedicated to preserving and revitalising traditional crafts and historic areas, creating sustainable livelihoods for artisans in Afghanistan and other regions.
The carpets in Weaving Poems are not merely decorative. The designs, although contemporary, draw inspiration from the topography and culture of the Bamiyan region.
“This tradition has been beautifully carried over centuries by the weaving women … unlike other arts that unfortunately disappeared,” Omar says.
The designs pay tribute to the weavers and their contribution to the craft. “I wanted the maker to be the main subject of the collection,” she says.
Omar has worked with carpet weaving communities in Afghanistan for more than a decade, familiarising herself with different techniques used across the country. She has formed a close relationship with the community in Bamiyan since she first visited in 2016 to understand their practices and help to build the collaboration with Turquoise Mountain.
For Weaving Poems, Omar wanted to further hone her understanding of the practices in Bamiyan, and regularly talked to the weavers online.
“There were a lot of discussions over chai, cookies and cakes,” she says. “It was very difficult to connect to Bamiyan, because the internet is not fantastic there, but still, we managed to get quite a lot out of that. I had my pen and pencil and notebook, and when we were talking, the focus was about their lives and their language and their folklore songs and poetry.”
The verses and songs she gathered greatly informed the visual language of the carpets. “I did collect quite a lot of literature, a lot of poetry, folk songs, everything,” Omar says. “I looked into what kind of words they'd used, what they talked about while weaving carpets, and from those words, I pictured them and selected the colours and the style and the movement.”
Reflecting on the fluidity of language, Omar chose to use watercolours for her designs. “I wanted to achieve the softness, the femininity of their lives, their words and the way they talked about their environment and the Bamiyan Valley.”
However, this also presented a technical challenge. How could the wash of watercolours be translated into wool using natural dyes? This was part of Omar's uncertainty until she saw the finished carpets in person.
“When you are working with watercolours, there is quite a lot of softness. And then I wanted to translate that into something graphic,” she says. “The carpets look very soft, but on the back is a graph, and you lose quite a lot of pixels. Going from a smaller size into such a massive scale, you lose a lot of life.
“It was definitely a challenge, doing the graph in a way that it doesn't lose that transparent feel. When you translate a work of art into carpet you cannot get all of those colours, so all of a sudden there is quite a lot of restriction.”
This was a challenge even to weavers in Afghanistan, who are known to produce some of the most intricate carpets in the world. “We can still do fantastic quality of carpets, where we do 50 knots by 50 knots every 10 centimetres. It catches a lot of detail, but it is not like a watercolour painting,” Omar says.
“From the 300 colours that a computer can pick up from a painting, you have to reduce that to 13 or 17 colours. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to still show the softness you’re trying to achieve.”
The moment of truth came when the carpets were installed in Doha’s M7. Omar approached the exhibition with an air of trepidation. Images of the works had suggested the colours did not match her designs or communicate the softness she sought.
“I thought: oh my God, what's going to happen?” she says. “But when you see them inside the exhibitions, they’re totally different.”
The exhibition took full advantage of the gallery’s 12-metre height, with carpets suspended in mid-air and soundscapes playing the weavers’ voices and recordings of the poems that inspired them.
“It was epic,” says Thalia Kennedy, creative director of the conservation body at Turquoise Mountain. “Most of the carpets were hanging free in space. They hung beautifully.
“There were soundscapes with the voices or the sounds of the workshops, and also the sounds of the poems being read out. There was also photography of the Bamiyan Valley by Lorenzo Tugnoli.
“We wanted it to be a very immersive experience that transported people to Bamiyan and to have the presence of the weavers in the exhibition.”
The exhibition at Sotheby’s retains many of these elements. While only 14 of the original 24 carpets are featured, the show still aims to transport audiences to Bamiyan.
“The spaces obviously are quite different in Sotheby's,” Kennedy says. “But it's a really beautiful exhibition with a lot of the same elements.
“It’s also a selling exhibition, which is always part of our work. Ensuring that the artisans derive income from the work that they do is paramount. Generating livelihoods is absolutely central to our mission.
“It’s great that Sotheby’s is providing this fantastic platform, both to tell the stories of Marion's beautiful designs and the weavers, but also to provide a platform for connoisseurs and buyers in London.”
Alexandra Roy, head of sale at the Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary Middle East department, says the programme aims to engage audiences with the history and traditions of the Bamiyan weavers.
“These works are not only beautiful, but also celebrate the incredible quality of the handmade, the innovative techniques employed and hard work behind each piece, highlighting the power of culture to transcend borders,” Roy says.
“Key moments of this month-long exhibition include live demonstrations in our galleries by the craftswomen themselves. The viewers are transported into the world behind the objects, a reminder of the importance of the process as much as the final result.”
Weaving Poems is running at Sotheby's until August 22
