This exhibition, co-curated by Jenny Brownrigg and Sabrina Henry (CCA), takes works from the textiles and fashion holdings at The Glasgow School of Art Archives and Special Collections as its starting point. A series of commissions invites four Scotland and UK-based artists and designers - Fiona Jardine, Raisa Kabir, Hanneline Visnes and Rabiya Choudhry- to track the diverse histories of their selected piece in order to present a new story or work from it. The title of the show, ‘ambi’, allows for dual stories, and acknowledges that the archival items of interest have, in a number of cases dual origins and appropriations. For example, ‘ambi’ is Punjabi for the pattern known in Scotland as paisley pattern.

Pursuing a line of research connected with the manufacture of carpets in the late 19th and early 20th century, Fiona Jardine looks at the relationship between space, place and labour. Originally concerned with weaving lace in Darvel, Ayrshire, by 1898 the firm of Alexander Morton & Sons had established an enterprise in Killybegs, Donegal making hand-knotted carpets. Prominent architects and designers such as George Walton and C.F.A. Voysey produced designs for Morton which were worked up by women in Killybegs, and the name ‘Donegal’ became synonymous with carpets of the highest quality.

Rabiya Choudhry investigates Paisley Pattern, which historically has its origins in Ancient Babylon or Iran, with its unique teardrop or ‘boteh’ form (the word ‘boteh’ is Persian for ‘shrub or cluster of leaves’). The seed like shape of paisley pattern is purported to represent fertility. Paisley pattern also became a bohemian emblem in the western world’s appropriation of it. Choudhry has collaborated with a textiles specialist to make small textiles from a series of new patterns she has designed which were printed at Centre for Advanced Textiles (GSA).

For her new work, Gather your spools, let your hair down for me. Gently. Here. Undo., Raisa Kabir performs with a woven head of hair, responding to the textile geographies of labour between Kashmiri woven shawls, Paisley, Scotland, Textile Archives, and South Asian diasporic migration and displacement. This work acts as a consequent reminder of the colonial imposed borders and the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan.

Hanneline Visnes is researching the work of Dorothy Carleton Smyth (1880-1933). The GSA Archives & Collections holds several costume designs by Smyth for Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Wilde’s Salome, and Wagner’s Parsifal. In 1914 Smyth became principal of Commercial Art at Glasgow School of Art, teaching miniature painting and the history of costume and armour. In 1933 she was offered and accepted the post of Director of the Glasgow School of Art, but tragically died of a brain haemorrhage, aged 52, before the appointment was made public. Visnes will respond to the costumes and characters created by Smyth in a series of new gouache drawings. Visnes will show her new cast of characters in paintings alongside Smyth’s costume studies of theatrical casts.