Submit Your Work

A pattern, and a reason for it. Navohi works with artists whose drawing comes out of somewhere — a craft they were taught, a place they are from, a body of ornament they already know how to read. Twelve countries are represented so far, and none of them was chosen to fill a map.

You do not need to know anything about kelaghayi. That is the part we bring. What helps is knowing your own material well enough to say why a shape is the shape it is.

It is worth knowing the constraint before you draw for it. A kelaghayi pattern is not printed from a file. It is cut into a block of pear or walnut, charged with hot wax, pressed onto silk, and dyed in a vat of plant colour — and every additional colour means the whole sequence runs again, with the risk of losing everything already laid down.

So the medium rewards a strong repeating unit, clear edges, and a small number of colours doing a lot of work. It is unkind to gradients, to photographic detail, and to fine line that would close up under wax. Within those limits it will do things nothing else does.

We read everything. If a pattern looks like it wants to be silk, we come back to you and talk about how it would be cut and what it would be dyed in — that conversation is where most of the work happens, and it is where a drawing usually changes.

If it goes ahead, a master in Şəki cuts the block and dyes the cloth, and the piece is published under your name with your signature on the page. Some proposals never reach the vats; those are published too, as concept pieces, because the half that did not get made is often the more interesting half.