Indigo

For a few weeks, since I found this wooden printing block from India in part of the family archive, I've thought of blipping it. Today, it seems linked for me with the horror of the earthquake in Japan, so it seemed the time to photograph it.

The block was brought back from India by my mother when she went there during the 1990s and visited several fabric workshops which interested her as an indigo dyer. The photographs with it were taken by her when she met an indigo dyer in Bhuj in Gujurat and were part of a montage I made for an exhibition of her work in 2003. The earthquake link, sadly, is that in 2001 just a few months before my mother died there was a terrible earthquake in Gujurat which killed 20,000 people. There was no way my mother could find out whether her friend the indigo dyer had survived.

The news from Japan is very worrying and I'm thinking of all those affected there.