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'Weaving Through The Rice Fields' is the extraordinary tale of ethnic Karen textile traditions in Burma and Thailand.
Living in semi-nomadic austerity in war-torn, remote hills, Karen women honed an astonishing artistry for 'homespun' – spinning, dyeing and weaving cotton to make clothes of fine skill and minute detail. It was an elaborately crafted, but time-consuming way to provide clothes in a subsistence economy. So when traders arrived with powder dyes, weavers abandoned their naturally dyed pastels for chemically treated skeins of blazing colour. Consequently the homespun tradition has unravelled in the face of the encroaching market economy and fifty years of civil war.
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