India
Hello, I'm Priya
Sharma
I am a block printer from Jaipur. My blocks are hand-carved from teak in Sanganer village, the same way they have been for three hundred years. Silk rewards that precision.
From the desert city of Jaipur, Priya Sharma is a master of traditional block printing and natural indigo dyeing. Drawing her visual language from the painted havelis of Shekhawati and the geometric lattices of Jaipur’s palaces, her work carries the sensory richness of a desert that is somehow also the most colorful place on earth.
In Sanganer, block printing is so old that no one can remember when it started. My family has been carving teak wood blocks for six generations. We have blocks older than my great-great-grandfather that we still use. The difference between a Sanganer block and a kelaghayi galib is the resist logic. In Sanganer, we print the colour. In Şeki, they print the absence of colour — paraffin where the dye must not go. The same wooden stamp, an inverted philosophy. I spent a week relearning everything I know from this inverted position. I carved a Jaipur palace jali pattern — the geometric lattice from the windows of the Hawa Mahal — as a paraffin-resist galib. The lines I had been carving for colour suddenly became lines carved against colour. The first time I tested it on silk with Narmin’s pomegranate dye recipe, the pattern appeared in reverse — pale geometry on dark ground. I had been looking at this pattern on palace walls my whole life and never seen it this way. The galib gave me new eyes for something six hundred years old.
— Priya Sharma, Jaipur, India
Motif
Hawa Mahal jali — Rajput stone lattice
Jaipur, India · Hawa Mahal · 18th century
How a collaboration works
Each artist here drew a pattern, and a master in Şəki turned it into cloth. Those are two separate skills and neither one substitutes for the other: the drawing decides what the piece says, and the block-cutting and dyeing decide whether silk can be made to say it.
The artists were not asked to imitate Azerbaijani ornament. They were asked for their own — shibori from Japan, adire from Nigeria, the block-printed vocabulary of Rajasthan, the wool figures of a Kyrgyz shyrdak — and then that drawing had to survive being cut into pear wood and held under hot wax. What comes back is neither the artist’s tradition nor Şəki’s. It is the argument between them.
The signature
Every artist page carries a signature, and every piece is published under the name of the person who drew it rather than under a house style. That is deliberate. A kelaghayi is anonymous work by tradition — the stamps in Basqal have outlived the names of everyone who cut them — and putting a name back on the cloth is the one thing Navohi does that the tradition does not.
Some artists have a full collection here. Some have a single concept piece that was never made. Both are on the page, because the record of what was proposed is part of the record of what exists.
Reading the pattern
The ornament is not decoration that happened to settle on the cloth. Each motif carries information, and the literature of the craft calls the whole system a book of life for anyone who can read its signs. Borders and centre take different stamps: pomegranate flower, crescent, grapevine and sun around the edge; small flowers, coins, quince flower, gazelle eyes, cat’s paw and leaf across the field. Plant motifs run to rose, narcissus, carnation, poppy, lily and iris, and they are set against straight and broken lines, zigzags, rhombuses and stars.
Colour is read the same way. Blue, red and ochre gold are the healing colours, credited with turning away the evil eye. Age and standing govern what is worn: dark, quiet tones and sparse ornament for an older woman; bright colour for a young one, who by tradition would not put on a black kelaghayi even at a funeral. The seven-colour work — red, blue, yellow, green, white, pink and dark brown on a single cloth — is held to be the ceiling of the craft.