MOTHERS | the women at the center of our work

We are intentional with our choice to work with women, small family workshops, and indigenous communities. This means that families, and mothers in particular, are at the center of our production framework. As mothers of school-aged children ourselves, we know how important it is to make space for all the different shapes that women's work needs to take.

At the Sirigu Women's Organization for Pottery and Art in northern Ghana, the weaving happens both at a community gathering site and at home. Women move between the two as their lives require. A child is sick, a family matter needs attending, the rains have come and the fields need work. The weaving fits around these realities rather than demanding they be set aside. That flexibility is what makes the work sustainable for the women who do it, and what allows craft knowledge to stay embedded in daily life rather than being separated from it.

This matters because craft that lives inside a community is craft that survives. The techniques being practiced by SWOPA's weavers are alive in the hands of women who learned them from their mothers, who learned from theirs. The work we receive is the result of that unbroken chain. The conditions that allow it to continue are the same conditions that allow women to be mothers, farmers and artists simultaneously rather than having to choose.

Belén Perez Garcia weaves palm in Oaxaca in a group of local women. Eligio Zárate Blanco's ceramic practice has been passed down through generations of his family in Santa María Aztompa. The thread running through all of our partnerships is the same. Craft held within families and communities, practiced in the spaces between the other demands of a life.

The pieces in our collection exist because women have carried this craft across generations, across continents, woven into the fabric of their daily lives.

Happy Mother's Day!