Weaving Magic by Hannah-Azieb Pool
15th August 2022
Designer and weaver Mariam Syed’s intricately woven and colourful textiles reflect her Pakistani heritage and her interest in technology
When Mariam Syed was growing up in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, her future looked like it would be guided by science. “I went to pre-medical school,” she says. “But I didn’t last three months – I couldn’t stand the sight of blood.” It was later, when tagging along with a friend to an art school orientation day, that she felt an instant connection with textiles: “The colours were so bright and the patterns so bold. That’s when I decided to study art.”
Syed is now an award-winning textile designer and QEST Anthony and Elizabeth Mellows Charitable Settlement Scholar. She makes complex, predominantly handwoven fabrics, scarves and rugs that display her passion for rich colour.
She first encountered weaving when she began her formal training at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi. Students learnt techniques from rural artisans, and Syed fell in love with the skill. She later visited the village of Hala, where she learnt the “sussi” method from the only hand weaver left there. “They have houses that are like small workshops, with people doing amazing tie-dye and block printing, and the way they do it is so organic, using onion and pomegranate skins for dyes,” says Syed. “I feel like I learned weaving in its purest form.”
She continued to refine her skills when she moved to Scotland, aged 22, to study textile design at Glasgow School of Art. “I was drawn to weaving partly because of my love for mathematics. I like the idea of constructing a fabric from geometric elements,” says Syed. In January this year she began an MA at Glasgow University supported by her QEST Scholarship. “It has changed my life,” she says, adding that it has enabled her to explore more deeply how science and art come together in the act of weaving.
Her experience of living in two continents has also shaped her work. “A lot of my inspiration comes from my cultural heritage,” she says. “In Pakistan trucks and buses are decorated all over with patterns and colours. When I lived there I hated them – I thought they were so gaudy and garish. But when I moved to the UK it felt so grey. I yearned for colour. The first time I went back to Pakistan I looked at the trucks again and thought ‘wow’.”
The complexity and beauty of Islamic design has long been an inspiration, and her QEST Scholarship is also supporting an eight-day residential course in Islamic geometric patterns at the Alquería de Rosales cultural foundation in Spain. “I am particularly interested in how the fundamental patterns and principles can be extended,” she says.
There are other religious traditions that have influenced her. “I visited Sufi shrines in Pakistan and learned about the deliberate imperfections Islamic artists included in their work to signify that God is perfect and humans make mistakes. I love that concept,” says
Syed. “I have always been very drawn to things that have a slight flaw because I feel they have a character and a soul.”
For her MA research Syed is studying how technology is impacting textile design and manufacture. “I want to look at how it is affecting traditional craft industries: is it a valuable part of the modern designer’s toolbox or is it just taking hand skills away?” This dichotomy is a challenge for Syed both artistically and intellectually. “My favourite, most sacred part of my practice is the making process, and I have always felt that technology takes that away from me,” she says.
Nevertheless, depending on what sort of yarn she wants to use, technology can be a necessity. Heavier wool is much easier to work with than fine silk, for example. “I have never woven a silk scarf,” she says. Instead, she makes samples and takes them to a mill.
It can take Syed as long as three days to set up a loom. She usually starts with the warp threads, which are stretched vertically. Horizontal “weft” threads are woven between them to create patterns. In the most simple “plain weave” each weft thread alternates over and under each warp thread, but Syed’s work is usually far more complex.
“The permutations and design possibilities are enormous,” she says. Even a small sample of woven silk can contain roughly 1,500 warp threads – a 30cm-square sample takes about 12 hours to create. Syed also uses a “double cloth” construction, weaving two different yet interconnected cloths at the same time. This requires double the effort, double the time and double the precision.
As her research unfolds she intends to focus on the notion of “the workmanship of risk – the idea that if you are making something by hand something will go wrong, so you can’t make the same thing again”. She is implicitly asking if computer-controlled processes spell the loss of the beauty of “deliberate imperfections” and the death of hand skills.
On a pre-pandemic British Council-funded research trip to Chengdu and Xian in China, Syed was struck by how technology is threatening intangible cultural heritage. “I saw the same thing there I had seen in Pakistan,” she says. “The older men have excellent hand skills, but they are not passing them down to the next generation because younger people are not interested. At the same time, the men are not prepared to innovate, while the younger generation have amazing digital skills. There is no bridge. They need to get together because these crafts are dying.”
In recent years Syed has moved from being defiantly anti-tech to being determined to unleash its power to enable creative research and improve sustainability. She has been experimenting with virtual reality, creating digital pieces using screenshots of her woven fabrics. She showed these in a virtual exhibition space as part of the DISTANCE Project run by Applied Arts Scotland this year.
She is also one of one of 20 digital and craft makers from the UK to complete the year-long iAtelier programme funded by Creative Europe, where she worked with a jewellery artist,
Tusheeta David, on a project called Talaash (“exploration” in Urdu) that investigated the imperfections that arise in digital fabrication.
Yet the meditative process of weaving remains her focus. “I just love the connection I have with my loom. It’s very therapeutic when you respond intuitively to the threads, the colours and the patterns and the moment in time. That process is spiritual for me,” she says.
Awarded Best Newcomer to the Weaving Industry (2020) by Craft Scotland, this year Syed has been commissioned by Fortnum & Mason to create a blanket for its Queen’s Platinum Jubilee hamper, the proceeds from which will go towards supporting a QEST Scholarship. Syed is passionate about encouraging others to apply for the support that has helped her so much. “The fact that QEST had confidence that I could succeed gives me the power to know I can.”
This article was written by Hannah-Azieb Pool, a writer and the artistic director and chief executive of London’s Bernie Grant Arts Centre. It originally appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of the QEST Magazine. Photos by Simon Murphy.