Sheila Paine

Sheila Paine was born on 29 September 1929 in Balham to Barbara Sykes and the quantity surveyor Edgar Thorpe. She was educated at Nonsuch Grammar School and London's Lycée Français. She did a foundation course at Hammersmith College of Art. She then broke off her education, travelling to South Africa to work as a translator and meeting a mining engineer, Leslie Paine. They returned to England, married in 1953, and had four children. She resumed her education at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University), eventually becoming a teacher of modern languages there. She began to collect English samplers, her first venture into the study of textiles.{{cite news |last=Fielding |first=Nick |title=Sheila Paine obituary |url=https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2022/mar/27/sheila-paine-obituary |access-date=5 April 2022 |work=The Guardian |date=27 March 2022}}{{cite news |title=Textiles expert who travelled solo around central Asia |url=https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/textiles-expert-who-travelled-solo-around-central-asia-tddtc36dt |access-date=24 September 2023 |work=The Times |date=14 May 2022}}

File:Mazar-e sharif - Steve Evans.jpg, with its historic blue mosque.]]

Leslie Paine was killed on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 when it crashed near Paris in 1974. Remaking her life, Sheila Paine began to travel to "the remotest of places" such as the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram Mountains, Eritrea, Somalia, Iran, or Siberia. She habitually travelled with 5 kilograms of baggage and a bottle of vodka; to save weight, she went so far as to cut the handles of her toothbrushes in half. She returned from each trip with carefully-labelled pieces of Islamic and other embroidery.{{cite news |title=A life richly woven with discovery and design |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/4191764/A-life-richly-woven-with-discovery-and-design.html |access-date=10 June 2022 |work=The Daily Telegraph |date=15 March 2004}} She was often given textiles by women she met: "Headbands, a child's cap or a jerkin would be thrust into her hands. Payment was often refused". She curated her collections meticulously, recording where she had acquired each item, and analysing how it was made.

In the late 1980s, she saw a richly-embroidered dress in a textile dealer's shop in London. It was described as coming from 'Kohistan' ("Land of the mountains"), which could have been a place in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, or Tajikistan. It was decorated with embroidered suns, coins, broken zip-fasteners, a triangular amulet of pieces of shell and beads, and no fewer than 647 triangles of cloth sewn on to the skirt's frill. Fascinated, she decided to discover where the dress had come from and what the embroidered symbols, especially the amulet, meant.

Many of her journeys were in search of the "linen goddess", a female figure who appears in embroidered textiles from the Greek islands to the Himalayas. These resulted in her trilogy of travel books, The Afghan Amulet in 1994, The Golden Horde in 1997, and The Linen Goddess in 2003.{{cite web |title=Sheila Paine |url=https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Sheila-Paine/410050627 |publisher=Simon & Schuster |access-date=10 June 2022}} Coming to the attention of museum authorities in charge of textile collections, she wrote books for the British Museum on textiles from India and from Pakistan.{{cite web |title=Sheila Paine |url=https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG181236 |publisher=British Museum |access-date=10 June 2022}} An exhibition of her photographs of her textile journeys, Embroidered Visions: Photographs of Central Asia and the Middle East by Sheila Paine, was held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, from November 2016 to April 2017. This was accompanied by an illustrated guide Embroidered Visions: Photographs by Sheila Paine, written by Paine, Katherine Clough, and Philip N. Grover.{{cite web |title=Embroidered Visions: Photographs of Central Asia and the Middle East by Sheila Paine |url=https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/event/embroidered-visions |publisher=Pitt Rivers Museum |access-date=10 June 2022}} An exhibition of textiles from her journeys, Stitch of a Symbol, was held at the Pitt Rivers Museum from August 2016 to February 2017.{{cite web |title=Stitch of a Symbol: Insights into the Textile Journeys of Sheila Paine |url=https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/event/stitch-of-a-symbol |publisher=Pitt Rivers Museum |access-date=10 June 2022}}

She stopped travelling at the age of 80, when she fractured her back. Unable to find an institution to buy her textile collection, she sold it at auction at Dreweatts in 2008. The British Museum acquired some of the pieces.For example, {{cite web |title=The Sheila Paine Textile Collection: Lot 105: A collection of embroidered items from Ghazni, to |url=https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/a-collection-of-embroidered-items-from-ghazni-to-105-c-pjo5az4laj |publisher=Dreweatts 1759 |access-date=10 June 2022}} She died aged 92 in March 2022.{{cite web |last=Richard |first=Sue |title=From India to Indonesia, Denmark to Turkmenistan and much, much more... |url=https://oxfordasiantextilegroup.wordpress.com/tag/sheila-paine/ |publisher=Oxford Asian Textile Group |access-date=10 June 2022 |date=14 March 2022}}{{cite web |last1=Bannister |first1=Matthew |title=Last Word: Madeleine Albright (pictured), Peter Padfield, Christina Smith, Sheila Paine |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0015vlz |publisher=BBC Radio 4 |access-date=10 June 2022 |date=3 April 2022}}

• {{cite book |last=Paine |first=Sheila |author-link=Sheila Paine |title=Chikan Embroidery: the floral whitework of India |year=1989 |publisher=Shire Publications |isbn=0-7478-0009-X |ref=none }}
• {{cite book |last=Paine |first=Sheila |author-mask=——— |title=Embroidered Textiles. Traditional Patterns from Five Continents |date=1995 |orig-year=1990 |publisher=Thames & Hudson |isbn=978-0-500-27823-9 |ref=none }}
• {{cite book |last=Paine |first=Sheila |author-mask=——— |title=The Afghan Amulet: travels from the Hindu Kush to Razgrad |publisher=Penguin Books |year=1995 |orig-year=1994 |isbn=978-0-14-017930-9 |oclc=60121423 |ref=none }}
• {{cite book |last=Paine |first=Sheila |author-mask=——— |title=Amulets: a world of secret powers, charms and magic |publisher=Thames & Hudson |publication-place=London |date=2004 |isbn=978-0-500-28510-7 |oclc=56645600 |ref=none}}

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• [https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG181236 42 objects acquired from Sheila Payne] in the British Museum collection

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Category:1929 births

Category:2022 deaths

Category:Embroidery

Category:People from Balham

Category:20th-century English women writers

Category:21st-century English women writers

Category:Art collectors from London

Category:British women art collectors

Category:Writers from the London Borough of Wandsworth

Category:20th-century British travel writers

Category:21st-century British travel writers