Introduction

Bharti Parmar arrived in Coventry in 1986 as a Fine Art student at Lanchester Polytechnic, graduating inside Coventry Cathedral. Thirty-five years later, she walks through different parts of the cathedral for the Hear Here podcast. Bharti discusses both her artistic practice, as well as the architectural and artistic features of the cathedral, before closing the conversation in the needleworkers’ room, which sits on the lower ground floor under the nave, next to the archives room. Her attention to the elements and patterns of site-specific materials is interconnected with her own practice, as well as with broader histories of colonialism and radicalism in the city of Coventry.

Bharti’s conversation moves between textile production, political change and the Sutherland tapestry; botany, colonialism, and the Live and Dye Garden; the Plumb Line, cities, pennies in the floor as liminal points and the canopy as a threshold; as well as the needleworkers’ room with kneelers, women’s groups, stitches; bell ringing and the mathematical system; as well as embodied research as a fellowship.

Bharti’s closing words on fellowship foreground how the collaborations across the Hear Here project have enabled the institution of different kinds of fellowship with specialists and knowledge makers from divergent and overlapping disciplines. A ‘homing desire’, as articulated by Avtar Brah (1996), emerges in the very habituation of the various locations in the cathedral, including the archives room, a space from which numerous fellowships have been forged and are yet to be developed.

A film with Bharti in the cathedral further supports the podcast discussion.

Biography

Bharti is an artist and academic with a focus on vernacular crafts and systems. She is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her current studio-based research project, Paper/Cotton/Plant, focuses on the intersections between materiality, geography, and botany with a special focus on The Herball, or, Generall historie of plantes 1597 by botanist John Gerard (1545-1612).

She studied Fine Art Printmaking at the Royal College of Art (1992). Her doctorate, titled A Grammar of Sentiment, Thinking about sentimental jewellery towards making new art about love and loss, was on the poetics of Victorian material culture, particularly jewellery, mourning cloth, trade, and affect. Her artwork is represented in numerous institutional collections, including the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Crafts Council Collection, the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, and the Government Art Collection. She has undertaken several artists' residency programmes, including AIR at Light Work Media Center, Syracuse and at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Links: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/historyofart/parmar-bharti

Instagram @bharti.parmar.studio

Podcast

Transcript

NIRMAL PUWAR: Hi everyone, we're here in the nave of Coventry Cathedral. Today is the 25th of March. And with me is Bharti Parmar, an artist who studied at Coventry University. Her work's known all over the world, and she has travelled from Birmingham to join us here. Thank you for coming to our Hear Here podcast. So, Bharti, would you like to share a little bit about what brought you to the city?

BHARTI PARMAR: Yes, certainly. I'm delighted to be here, Nirmal. What brought me to the city was a degree in fine arts. I’m Indian. My parents came to England in the 1960s. I grew up in Yorkshire, and it was unheard of for young women in my generation to go to university, so I was the first. I was really interested in art and design, so I came to what was then Coventry, Lanchester Polytechnic in 1986. That was 39 years ago. And I enjoyed it so much I stayed on for an extra year! [laughs] I was here for four years in total, leaving in 1990.

[construction noise in the background]

NIRMAL PUWAR: Right now, we can hear some background noise from the repairs, as it's been many years since the Cathedral was built. You had come to the Cathedral in the 80s, so the building was up for about 20 years then. Do you remember visiting?

BHARTI PARMAR: I certainly remember visiting the Cathedral. I'm a Hindu, and temples are visual spaces. That's why I was really attached to the Cathedral as a Hindu. I could really appreciate the visual languages present around, outside, and inside—the colours, textiles, shapes, textures, furniture, and glass. That really spoke to me.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Yes, the glass. It's all around us. It's particularly drawing us in today because the sunlight speaks with the glass to us. A lot of your work is on patterns, colour, and rearrangements. Did this place influence you in any way?

BHARTI PARMAR: I did a fine art degree at Coventry Polytechnic, and I specialised in printmaking. Printmaking is a graphic and hands-on means of making work. It's really to do with the work of the hand. That's something I've become really interested in. My trademark is work which is highly crafted by the hand. Often, my hands feature as a trope or a motif in the work that I make. So, I really appreciate the references to craft within the Cathedral. I've always understood that as a particular language. I mean, right here, I'm standing in the nave, facing the altar, looking at Graham Sutherland's tapestry, the scale of which is monumental.

NIRMAL PUWAR: The tapestry was woven by women in France. It was dyed there. The colours were dyed in accordance with what Sutherland wanted.

You have a special interest in, as you say, work made from the hand, and textiles as well. You mentioned that your father worked in textiles in the north of England when he migrated, and recently, you've embarked on thinking about textiles and colonial histories.

[00:04:16]

BHARTI PARMAR: My father came to this country in 1962 and started working as a textile industrial mill worker in Bradford and then in Leeds. And so, I've always grown up in urban environments. In 2021, I was approached by the British Textile Biennial. That’s a festival which runs every two years in Lancashire's post-industrial mill towns, with the hub being Blackburn.

During the pandemic, I won a small grant to explore my own history, something I hadn’t explored before. I'm particularly interested in mills and the north of Yorkshire, particularly cotton and wool and their relationship to India. Subsequently, this was picked up by the British Textile Biennial. I was invited to tell a story about Gandhi visiting Blackburn in 1931, marking the 90th anniversary of Gandhi's visit there. I knew nothing about Blackburn and had no idea that Gandhi had visited. From that, we initiated a research process that culminated in a major solo show at Blackburn Museum, an art gallery, called Khadi.

Khadi means two different things. Khadi is the rough cotton that Gandhi promoted Indians to spin for an hour a day, each day. Gandhi realised that a way to harm the colonial leadership was to stop buying foreign goods and foreign cotton, and instead use one's own materials. India grew cotton, which was then sent to Manchester, and the bale was processed and sent back to India 40 times dearer. So, that small act of resistance by spinning our own produce was called Khadi. It’s a rough cotton, but it is also an expensive watercolour paper.

In the exhibition at Blackburn Museum, I sourced paper made from recycled t-shirts in an Indian mill. All good quality watercolour paper is 100% cotton, and that cotton's got to come from somewhere. So, recycled t-shirts from the Western body go to this mill in India, and they are pulped and macerated and then made into this high-quality Western product for consumption.

What’s really interesting to me as an artist is the cycle of reuse, recycling, colonialism, and shipping journeys, and how something goes from West to East to West again. On the paper, I used lots of punching mechanisms which allude to the work of the hand but also Jacquard loom cards since Blackburn was famous for spinning and weaving.

NIRMAL PUWAR: You’ve been exploring the link between cotton and colonialism, between India and Blackburn, as well as the Atlantic and the transatlantic slave trade, and how all of this is connected to cotton. In your collaboration with Corinne Fowler, especially in Island Stories, you’ve taken particular walks to highlight these entangled histories.

BHARTI PARMAR: That’s right. I was invited by Professor Corinne Fowler to walk and to talk about the Cotton Famine Road. The Cotton Famine Road is a road in Rochdale that goes nowhere. It’s a really poignant space because during the American Civil War, there were blockades of cotton from the plantations in the Deep South and the Confederate ports. That meant that men in Manchester and Lancashire had no work, so as a type of social security, they were put to work making a road, the Cotton Famine Road. This is a road which runs across the moor and is now in much disrepair.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Bharti, you mentioned how certain aspects of the Cathedral, such as the fabric and the art, have been so influential and inspirational for you. Right now, we're standing in front of the Plumb Line.

[00:09:25]

BHARTI PARMAR: The Plumb Line is one of my favourite pieces of work here. So, the plumb line is a mechanical device to determine whether a building is straight. As a printmaker, I've always been interested in geometry, shapes and patterns. Within this Plumb Line, we're looking at a series of metal shapes and pieces. I don't know how many there are—probably 200 or 300—all in different shapes of metal, different colours, patinated bronzes, browns, silvers, all made to look like a cityscape on a plinth.

I used to come in here regularly to look at the patterns and use those as inspiration in things I was doing in the studio. I was making paper, ceramic casts, prints, etchings, monoprints and some of the simple shapes like curves, arcs, spires, and diamonds. I was literally inspired by the spires.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Bharti, you've always been drawn to these pennies on the floor, and we can see at least three where we are standing.

[00:10:59]

BHARTI PARMAR: I've been drawn to the pennies on the floor because I'm really interested in detail, and often, things that people miss are what I make work about. I'm particularly interested in the work of the hand, as I've mentioned before, but also in the quietness, slowness, and poetics of repair.

These pennies are inserted into the floor here, almost like fossils [moving closer to the floor]. So here, we're looking at— I think it's a two-pence piece— we're looking at a picture of Queen Elizabeth, we can still see her head.

Whereas if we walk back a little bit here [sound of walking], this penny is inserted into the stone floor. The stone floor won't wear away, or it will show marks of wearing away eventually, whereas the copper coin is soft and it shows the mark of human travel. People walk across it, and the material is worn away, but then it ends up on the soles of people's shoes, and that matter is transferred to other places. As an artist, I find that really poetic; that matter can't be created, but it just moves away, re-attributing itself. This is what I find really interesting [continuing to move]. Here, the penny is completely worn away. It’s just a copper and brass alloy disc, and it's shiny. It’s just full of liminal promise, and that's what I find really interesting.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Liminal promise, take us there [laughs]!

BHARTI PARMAR: [laughs] I'm really interested in thresholds and the connection between one thing and another. A really good example of the liminal is the arched roof that connects the new building to the ruins. When I was a student here in the 1980s, I'd often go for walks in the evenings on long summer days, and the stretch of that roof and its underside was lit up, which was a joy. That's a physical manifestation of the liminal, joining one to the other and all the metaphors associated with that.

NIRMAL PUWAR: It's a real threshold space, isn't it— between the old, the ruin and the possibility of a future.

BHARTI PARMAR: And of reconciliation.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Yes, which is continuing the hope, at least.

BHARTI PARMAR: It is. As we come into the entrance, there is a sign outside. It says that people have worshipped on this hill for a thousand years. This church, even though it's a new church, is almost the same age as I am. I was born in 1966, but it's been well-prayed in. It's a receptacle of people's hopes, joys, fears and petitions to God. I really value that.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Bharti, a lot of your work has so much to do with touch and tactility. And here, we're standing right next to a model that your friend, Professor John Hall, made. This is one of several models he designed. It was launched in 1990 amongst three cathedrals. Coventry was one of the cathedrals he's worked with. What are your thoughts on this model? I know your friend is no longer with us, but did you know of this work?

BHARTI PARMAR: I'm afraid I didn't know of this work. I think I've passed this before, but it's tucked away in the corner. We've just pulled it out today to have a good look at it. So, we're standing in front of a wooden cabinet cube. It's probably two feet square, and inside it is a wooden model of the Cathedral and a three-dimensional floor plan.

I knew Professor John Hall well. We knew him as a family. John died some years back, but he was blind. He was a professor of religious education at Birmingham University. My husband knew John because my husband is clergy in the Church of England; they would often meet and go to the pub together and have chats. His wife, Marilyn and I were good friends. They would often come and see us socially. Every time I met John, he asked such searching questions. It was like having a PhD viva [laughs], because he was just so interested in everything. This is such a fantastic piece of work we're looking at here.

NIRMAL PUWAR: We're standing right in front of John Hutton's West Screen, looking onto the ruins of the Cathedral. There's so much radical history associated with the Cathedral, particularly in terms of the arts, Bharti. How have you been connecting or drawn to that?

BHARTI PARMAR: So, Coventry Polytechnic was always seen as a radical art school. In the 80s, when I was there, it was very much a school of fine art. The 70s was a time of art and language, which was a conceptual movement to do with thinking, space, words and text.

Here, we're standing on copper and brass text embedded in the floor. Coventry has always been a radical place. Think about contemporary culture, vernacular cultures, music, and the Two-tone movement. It was an honour to be part of that in the 1980s.

NIRMAL PUWAR: If we think about those radical histories, as you say, in the contemporary moment, one of the ways in which they manifest themselves is through food, food growing, and food sharing. The Pod, which has a soil-to-table philosophy, actually has a food union-led Live and Dye Garden attached to the Cathedral. It was a piece of rubble, but during City of Culture, they came together with staff from the Cathedral and across the city to make it into this Live and Dye Garden, to make dyes for art, but also for the medicinal properties of the plants. I have held many events there.

You have been working so closely with botany—the history, the labels, especially in your recent work—and linking it with colonialism.

[00:18:34]

BHARTI PARMAR: I'm really excited to learn that the Cathedral has this initiative, and the Live and Dye Garden is an inspiring title.

As I mentioned earlier, I've been working with cotton as an agent of political change. My research has expanded slightly to look at plants and botany. I've been looking at old English herbals— these encyclopaedias of plants. My current research, funded by the Arts Council England, is looking at John Gerard's history of plants. This is an encyclopedia from 1597. John Gerard was a botanist, and in his book, he lists plants.

My thesis is quite simple. I'm looking at all plants with an Indian nomenclature in the title. Given that in 1597, there would have been very little travel there. I want to make a new series of drawings, not recreating those engravings within the encyclopaedia, but interpreting them using some of the materials that they described. So, for example, hemp illustrations will be made out of hemp paper and so on and so forth. So, it's really about the intersection between geography, materiality and botany.

NIRMAL PUWAR: So, we're here in the Needleworkers' room now. It’s under the nave, next to the archives room. Right in front of us is a table that still has pins, threads, fabric, and scissors on it. We also have a photograph of women sitting around the table, stitching away, having cups of tea, and they seem to be repairing kneelers.

[00:20:41]

BHARTI PARMAR: This picture has come off the notice board. It's dated June 10, 1995. What we're looking at is a photograph of women from the sixties and seventies, probably ten of them around a table, sewing, mending, having a cup of tea, having fellowship and doing work.

It's interesting because needlework has always been referred to as work. The term work is to keep your work facing you as you're sewing. I've always been interested in sewing and samplers as a document of women's lives, especially Victorian samplers.

NIRMAL PUWAR: There are many different kinds of fellowships that come together in this building, including those related to music, chair repair, or even artistic fellowships. If you were granted a fellowship here, how would you feel?

BHARTI PARMAR: Well, that would be a dream come true [laughs]. I would love to be an Artistic Fellow at the Cathedral.

There are so many responses I could make to the shape, the architecture, the intervention, the pennies in the floor, the crown of thorns, the Hans Coper— I don't know what they are. Are they candelabras?— and the ecclesiastical furniture.

NIRMAL PUWAR: It would also connect with some of your research, possibly on India and cloth, because of the trails and movements between people and the arts across the continents right here in this space.

As you know, Basil Spence, the head architect of the Cathedral, was born in India, and he visited the Elephanta Caves in Mumbai as a young boy. He said he was profoundly taken in by it and it actually influenced his designs for the Cathedral. So, perhaps your journeys would take us somewhere in those directions as well.

BHARTI PARMAR: I'm really interested in experiential research and experiential knowledge. Talking about cloth, colonialism, embodied and embedded research brings to mind the act of wearing cloth on the body. I often speak at conferences dressed in a sari. Occasionally, I wear white saris, and occasionally I wear black saris. I'm really interested in that minimalist palette —I use black and white in my drawings —because they refer to an obvious racial register.

Just one thing I'd like to reflect on, I spoke at the Museums Association Annual conference a couple of years ago with Corinne Fowler, whom we've mentioned earlier, to promote her book on walking. When we walked the Cotton Famine Road, I didn't walk in a sari [laughs]. Obviously, it's an elemental place. It’s really cold in winter and very hot in summer, because it's exposed and there's no shade. However, Gandhi came to this country and to Blackburn in September in a white dhoti. A dhoti is a loincloth.

During that conference, I wore a white cotton sari— a white kadi sari— because I wanted to use the white cloth as an identifier, a material and visual prop. I wore white cotton to talk about white cotton.

NIRMAL PUWAR: So, I think the cotton stories might bring us back to your work on another occasion. Maybe you'll come back to the Cathedral to share more of your work, perhaps in a white or black sari? Thank you for joining us and for walking all over the Cathedral with us. We’ll end our conversation here in the Needleworkers’ room, but I won't say “end”, just “closing” it for now, to be continued.

BHARTI PARMAR: It's been an absolute delight. I just can't imagine myself, 35 years ago, as a 22-year-old Indian girl graduating here, being invited back years later to talk about my experience of Coventry, which involved my experience of Coventry Cathedral. It's an absolute pleasure. I'm delighted to be here.

References

Brah, A. (1996) Cartographies of diaspora: contesting identities. London: Routledge.

Fowler, C. (2024) Our Island Stories: country walks through colonial Britain. London: Allen Lane.