Afghan and Burmese carpets are mesmerising artworks — can they become a thriving industry?

For centuries, women in the dusty plains and plunging valleys of Afghanistan created textiles of startling richness. From homespun wool shorn in landscapes as barren as the moon, they wove abstract compositions of black and white on grounds of deep red. At their best, these were mysterious and mesmerising works of art, produced collectively by illiterate communities.

But decades of war left their mark. By the time the UK-based NGO Turquoise Mountain started working with Afghan carpet-weavers in the 2010s, the remaining workshops were sorely battered. Turquoise Mountain arranged for the supply of high-quality wool, dyes and equipment and introduced a level of standardisation — preset sizes, patterns and colour schemes — to attract large-scale orders from US homeware retailers. Today they help 8,000 weavers to produce thousands of carpets a year and provide free healthcare to more than 30,000 Afghans in mobile clinics.

“That’s the difference between us if we were running an interiors business and what we actually are,” Turquoise Mountain’s president Shoshana Stewart explains when we meet in the South Kensington house she shares with her husband, former cabinet minister Rory Stewart. “We exist with a mission . . . to preserve traditions.” After nearly 20 years of work, some of those traditions — such as decorative woodwork and marquetry — will go on display at Sotheby’s in London later this month.

According to Shoshana, the NGO’s mission consists of two, rather different, goals. The first is to ensure that the hand-production of particular kinds of goods, endangered by war and poverty — as well as by global supply chains — does not die out. The second is to improve the quality of life of the communities producing those goods.

Turquoise Mountain was founded in 2006 (with the support of King Charles, then the Prince of Wales) on the premise that those two goals overlap. The Stewarts began working with Afghan woodcarvers in the Old City of Kabul. There they discovered one of the last artisans who knew how to carve “panjareh” fretwork screens from wood, selling fruit in the bazaar. In restoring the neighbourhood and setting up a craft school, Turquoise Mountain was born.

They began to find buyers for the work of “communities at risk” in Afghanistan, Myanmar and the Levant, whose intensive handwork put them at the intersection of art and high-end consumer goods. According to Rory Stewart, who ran the charity until 2008, the luxury market has proved pivotal. “When I started, it was very much one commission here, one commission there,” he says. “Now it’s much more professional . . . with very particular quality and logistics control.” To date, they have sold more than $17mn worth of work directly to clients and facilitated over $20mn of sales by the artists they work with.

Turquoise Mountain develops these products “in dialogue with the artisans”, says creative director Thalia Kennedy. For example, delving into the textile traditions of Myanmar’s myriad, fractured communities, they discovered that they needed to tone down the colours of the “acheik” — a “royal” Burmese silk woven on a metre-wide loom with 100 shuttles — before they could sell it as a high-end furnishing fabric. Other textiles, for example those woven by women on back-strap looms in the midst of a many-fronted civil war in Kachin State, didn’t need to modified at all.

Turquoise Mountain relies on donor funding. In its first year of operation, it received £1.1mm of donations. This year, its budget is around 10 times that, with about 60 per cent from governments, and the rest from foundations and private donors. 

“We still don’t make a profit,” says Shoshana. “The people making money are the artisans.” The “manufacture of the product”, she argues, is financially sustainable, with profits from sales paying for supplies, transport facilities and labour, so “the prices you see are all real prices”. Ultimately, Turquoise Mountain is designed to become “incidental” to the artists it works with; after training them and opening viable markets, it aims to remove itself from the equation.

“We initially faced resistance,” says Shoshana, who attributes their eventual success to the fact that they have placed an “asset” — artistic heritage — at the centre of their offering. Rory Stewart agrees: “So many donor projects [in Afghanistan] treated people just as victims. It was like: ‘You’re poor, you’re uneducated, you’re unhealthy — we’re going to come and teach you.’ This inverts that model.”

Turquoise Mountain’s 500 staff members also work to ensure access to education, healthcare and clean drinking water, which allows them to gain acceptance. When I express surprise that the Taliban government allows them to keep working with women, and at such scale, in Afghanistan, Shoshana shoots back: “They don’t want to [say no].” She feels they appreciate the fact that Turquoise Mountain is “celebrating Afghan beauty”.

But if large-scale job creation and healthcare services are, as she says, “very uncontroversial”, the same could not be said of the Taliban’s gender policies. In September, the UN refugee agency had to cut services in Afghanistan after female staff members were barred from work. But Shoshana firmly believes in the necessity of working in “situations where we can make a big difference”, pointing out that her NGO is not “an advocacy organisation . . . and never will be”. Instead it takes a pragmatic, “consciously apolitical” approach — for instance, choosing to work in Myanmar, where the junta “have other things to worry about”, but not in Syria, where the Assad regime was more controlling: “whatever resources we put in, much less would come out”.

The Stewarts unroll a large calligraphic canvas on the floor of their drawing room — a thicket of Persian poetry overlaid on abstract forms of gold and silver. It is the work of the Afghan artist Alibaba Awrang, who taught at Turquoise Mountain’s Kabul headquarters until the Taliban takeover in 2021. His stencilled murals, recently unveiled at the Wadsworth Museum in Connecticut, illustrate Turquoise Mountain’s achievement: heritage transformed into original, vital works of art. But heritage also requires thriving independent industries to survive — a challenge, still, for many of Turquoise Mountain’s artisans.

turquoisemountain.org

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