If you walk into the Goa State Museum and see the large embroidery artwork depicting a Goan landscape, please stop and stare. You are bound to be rewarded at both the sensory and spiritual level. You will notice that the cloth display has been entirely embroidered by hand using the age-old technique of the needle and thread. Over a 100 Goan women had worked on this piece of art which was donated to the state museum in 2002 by the artist-educator Eleanor Viegas of the Betalbatim village.
Eleanor, who is of British origin and married to a Goan lives and works out of her artistic home in one of the leafy by-lanes of this south Goan village. Eleanor, an artist and textile design graduate has made preservation of the art of embroidery her life’s purpose under her ‘Stitches in Time’ programme.
Presently, she is spearheading an ambitious project called the ‘Banyan Tree project’ which sees over a 100 women from the villages of Betalbatim, Majorda, Benaulim and the city of Margao working on a four by two metre long embroidery artwork depicting a banyan tree. The Banyan Tree project which began in 2013 could easily take another two years to complete, so painstaking is the effort. Girish Gujar, the noted Goa based artist has drawn the banyan tree on paper and then made smaller, schematic pieces to guide the many groups of women working on the project.
However, the fascination for embroidery is not new to Eleanor. It began several years ago when she was the museum education officer at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in England, where she worked for 24 years until 1997. It was in Birmingham that Eleanor first conducted several sessions of cloth embroidery with a cross section of Asian women. “Yes, the seeds for my embroidery projects were sown in Birmingham. I knew the Asian women had the embroidery skills ingrained in them. I used to make them look at the artefacts on display and replicate the same through embroidery. The women loved this community activity,” Eleanor recalled.
Eleanor also worked with children inside the Birmingham museum. “Every Saturday, 20-30 school children used to troop into our museum. The children were shown old paintings and exposed to classical music from the same era and then asked to express themselves through art. This was a very satisfying experience,” Eleanor said.
According to Eleanor, museums and art galleries should not be static entities. “As museum managers, we need to breathe life into the museum artefacts and collections, otherwise the place could become dead and boring. In Birmingham I used to allow school children to touch and feel old medieval artefacts which were not on display. The children were asked to paint and draw what they had just seen,” Eleanor said. A slice of this experience is replicated in her Betalbatim home every Saturday, when children from the neighboring villages troop in to paint and draw to their heart’s content.
Eleanor’s Goa innings began in the late nineties, when she rented an apartment in Panjim and began frequenting the Goa State Museum at Patto. This is when Eleanor decided to replicate the embroidery projects of Birmingham. Based on her own strong artistic training and knowledge of textiles, Eleanor decided to create a large cloth embroidery artwork depicting the Goan rural landscape. Over 100 women, many from the villages of Goa were given small artworks which they needed to recreate with embroidery on cloth. Noted social worker, Asha Sawardekar, who used to work with the state’s rural development agency then galvanised many village women for this project and herself did a fair bit of embroidery work. Recalls Sawardekar, “It was a very fulfilling project for the village women as they learnt a new skill.”
Eleanor is almost an evangelist when it comes to cloth embroidery. She says, “In India, the needle and thread has always been a symbol of unity and strength. When women come together to stitch they not only preserve something valuable from the past, but they help create a strong and beautiful future.”
Eleanor’s close associate, Jyoti Gujar seconds this thought whole heartedly. A masters in textile design, Jyoti has been assisting Eleanor on the latest Banyan tree embroidery project. Says Jyoti, “Embroidery is an art. Most women who are homemakers spend several hours watching television serials. With projects such as ours, we are able to bring such women under one roof and make them work together happily. Happiness is the main motto of these embroidery projects initiated by Eleanor.”
Eleanor Viegas can be contacted at eleanorviegas@gmail.com
