Issue No. 594
Culture
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11 - 17 July 2002 Issue No. 594 Culture |
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The coats are coming
Sally Hampson, who studied textiles at the Royal College of Art in London, first came to Egypt in 1992 to work on a women's textile project in Al-Arish. Subsequently she worked with the St Catherine's Protectorate on income generating projects, and was responsible for establishing the core collection of Bedouin textiles currently housed in St Catherine's Monastery. At the same time she was working on reconstructing the journeys in Egypt of Kitty Lake, anthropologist and explorer, and made a short documentary film on the Bedouin Weavers of Marsa Matrouh. Kitty has been the subject of several exhibitions: her journeys in the Rishmoo Islands formed the focus of an exhibition at the Horniman Museum in London and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Kitty in Egypt was first exhibited at the British Council in Cairo, and her journeys on the west coast of Ireland was shown at Egg in London
I was first invited to Egypt by the British Council to work with Bedouin women. It was a very exciting period, and a great privilege to be able to spend time with the women. Very few people have the opportunity to work so closely with them, and in such remote places. I was invited because of my interest in low technology: I have always been fascinated by the simplest looms. As a student all my contemporaries were excited about computerised looms and the whole industrial process: we were basically being trained as designers to go into industry. Instead I spent time in the furniture department building my own loom.
For years I was going backwards and forwards, between London and Sinai, trying to keep the whole thing going. And while it was wonderful to have such access to the daily lives of the women, the problem with so many development projects is the top-heavy bureaucracy, which takes up so much of your time and can be very disheartening. You get so tied up with the bureaucratic procedures that in the end you find there is too little time to pursue creatively what you are supposed to be pursuing.
It was the project that first took me to the desert. I was already working with Kitty, a character I had invented, tracing her journeys. I had been working, having exhibitions, doing what I thought I was supposed to do and then I had this exhibition, and the gallery had done no work and nothing sold and I thought something had to change. So I came up with Kitty, as a creative vehicle, as something to tie my work together. I had always been fascinated by museum displays, and the way they fabricate a story through the display of objects and I thought I could do that.
When I was making the Kitty in Egypt stuff I wanted to visualise her journey through Sinai and the Western Desert so I started to work with photography, and film, as well as the objects she collected. And of course there were her clothes, and her travel coat. The front of her dress was a bit like a map, she collected fossils and stones and shells, and these were sewn on so that you could begin to read her dress. With her coat I took it further. I wanted a text to go inside the coat, something with very concrete, desert images, and I looked and looked at poetry, mostly pre-Islamic, but nothing seemed quite right. And then I asked a friend, a Bedouin, and he just wrote a poem, incredibly intuitively, which I printed on the inside of the coat.
In March I was invited to take part in the Doha Festival. There was an awful lot of folkloric things, singing and dancing, but there were also poets there, reading their work. I took along my current project, a series of coats, travel coats, that would have been worn by poets. I'm trying to make the poetry itself tangible, to express something of it, some element, in the clothes. For part of the display they were on stands. The idea was that the coats would be on stands, like figures, and then some of the time they would be worn, by a reciter, who would wander through the exhibition space mumbling lines of verse from the particular poet whose coat he was wearing. Basically, I was working from translations of pre-Islamic poems, and also with my own experience of the desert, and of Bedouins, welding the two together.
I feel as if I have just started with the project, just scratched the surface. Now I want to age the coats, and work on more details that will bring out the character of the individual poets. I hope that, very much like Kitty, the project will take on a life of its own, will form a core around which other things can be hung. Hopefully I will be showing the coats, further embellished, at the opening of the Alexandria Library, and then later, fingers crossed, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
In England I also work on educational projects with children, often with special needs. And Kitty comes into these projects. We created a natural history museum, the Bird-Lake collection, founded by Kitty Lake and William Bird, and the children made all the exhibits, they made fossils and nests and eggs and insects. The Natural History Museum donated lots of wonderful old entomology cabinets. Its an on-going project, and moves around, with different groups of children contributing, adding on different departments to the museum. A botanical department is in the offing, and there will be beautiful seed pods and things growing in phials. Recently I was working with dyslexic children, and I decided to base the project around communication. The children created their own alphabets, and whenever anything had to be written they wrote it in their own alphabets, which worried the teacher, who thought they might get confused. They didn't, they loved it.
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