Meetings with Remarkable Weavings

The warp and weft of a life spent travelling with nomads and bartering with Tibetan monks is contained in a book written by textile trader Dominic Orr and on sale at his exhibition in Birdwood House.

Colonel Gadaffi paid my wages

Hung on the walls are exquisite rugs, wedding shawls and hand made textiles he has gathered in more than 20 years of travelling. Many are hundreds of years old and bear the traces of the people who made and used them. Their stories are contained in Meetings with Remarkable Weavings.
“I am only involved with these things not because I’m a weaver, not because I love the tribes, but there’s something about people who venerate nature through an activity which is spinning dying and making things they need to live. That’s something I respect. If you go to the places and trek though the mountains you sort of absorb some of the energy that goes into them. And you realise what we here, in our culture, have lost . These people see themselves as one element of many elements and there is a certain respect for nature. Here we have lost this. “

Dominic’s early childhood as a bottle digger with mum Jan, who began the Revival vintage clothing store which is still going in Totnes , started him off as a young trader in the market. Scavenged fragments of pottery with names or faces on, he turned into brooches and sold. Studio glass and studio pottery dealing followed but fashions change and after a while he quit. Next came TV work with Smith and Watson, the Totnes production company. And then it was time to travel.

Dominic went first to India and then China, teaching English . He lived for some time in Wuhan. Yes, that one…
“That’s when I went to Tibet and started trekking . Since then I’ve been to South America, I lived in Libya with the Tuareg people for a year with the British Council. Colonel Gadaffi paid my wages there. I even had a letter from him . I went right across the Sahara, hitching to Mali. There was no public transport, I didn’t have a mobile phone or even any ID , but I did have a letter signed not by Gadaffi himself but by the clans there saying if anyone touches this guy……so you stand at the side of the road, people stop and you show them this letter. And they say where do you want to go Sir! A bit like travelling here in Elizabethan times!”

Each chapter of the book is about an artifact and through it you learn what it was for, who made it, the provenance of it. One story involves a lengthy negotiation over a Tibetan meditation rug which was so protracted it became a daily piece of theatre watched by the town… and to find out what happened, you need to buy the book.

Writing it, he realised how his carpet fascination actually began . His father was born in Cairo before the war and his mother, an Army matron, bought rugs which had travelled from Central Asia on trading routes to Cairo. When they returned to Britain these rugs were in grandmother’s living room, sadly out of bounds to little boys, and some are still with him and on show.

“To a child they are things from another world but I didn’t know their significance at six years old…it’s only later in life I realised that where it all started , with my dad’ mum’s collection.”

The exhibition runs at Birdwood House until November 2.
Ends