Tai Phouan

Every now and then a textile so exquisite and unique shows up on our doorstep. The first of these was back in 2001, when a trader from Houaphan Province brought to the gallery a long cloth of ikat and supplementary weaving designs. Veo, a textile connoisseur, was rendered speechless.
Ethnologists write that Lao textiles can be traced back to specific villages because the design is so representative of that unique culture or family. We decided to put that theory to test. Five of us set off for Houaphan, textile in hand, looking for the woman that had made this cloth.
To make a long story short we did indeed find that artisan, the connection had thus been made with a remote community and together we started working on reproducing textiles that took in some cases six months to produce. This was how the Village Weaver Projects started.