The Big Mango

Late last year, I was invited to spend three weeks at Spacehouse Himalayas as a guest artist. Well acquainted with India’s textile treasures and material culture from my years at the British Council, keen for time, space and fresh design inspiration and up for an overseas adventure, I was thrilled by the invitation.

Spacehouse, designed seven years ago by the Swedish architect Inger Thede, is a stone and timber structure sitting high above the villages of Satoli and Peora; a series of interconnected lozenge shapes extending laterally across the mountainside property to maximise views from the rooms, terrace and first floor loggia. The airy and ingeniously configured interior, finished in polished lime plaster and red cedar, solar powered and passively ventilated accommodates up to eight artists with sleeping quarters and a studio each.

I’d been thinking about another Edition; something ‘mangoid’ perhaps; and India, where the mango is ubiquitous as a decorative motif and flavour, was the perfect place to work it up. En route to the Himalayas I had a few days in Delhi to source my supplies. The hot tip of our Spacehouse host and impresario, Priti Rao, was HP Singh, an emporium on at least five floors near Nehru Place in South Delhi, where I stocked up on tropical fruit coloured Chanderi – cotton woven with silk.

I began by drawing my shapes at 1:1 scale on paper taped to the wall. These shapes became my templates for cutting and piecing in a pre-determined order. Knowing that at some point I would have the opportunity to meet some local stitchers, and hoping to recruit some help in hand quilting, I raced to flatten the whole thing out by quilting it all over in concentric parallel lines 4cm apart in the hope that I could hand it over to others to quilt between my lines.

Nine stitching ladies turned up at the Oak Bunglalow – an historic Dak, or local administrative centre, now an elegant residence – on a rainy Sunday afternoon to hear what I had to say and show. I introduced the mango quilt and my hand quilting technique, and I handed round practice models with threaded needles for everyone to practice. The ladies sat on the carpet chatting and laughing as they passed the models back and forth to add their quilted lines, then four took a corner each of the big mango and started to make progress inwards. Alas, this being wedding season, our efforts to agree a second date for more sewing were thwarted. When the big mango would be my bequest to Spacehouse, I had my work cut out to get the principle shapes quilted to a good density before I left.

I was accompanied by my husband, painter Ned Campbell, also a resident artist at Spacehouse. For a running commentary on the residency by fellow artists Joanna Thede and Tony Petersson, and lots of pictures, please enjoy this blog. I will follow up with an article on my second Spacehouse quilt, the Big Tulip.

My studio with a view South-West