Talk - Ethel Mairet

Ethel Mairet lived an unusual life for a woman in Victorian England. Not only did she attend the Royal Academy of Music and teach pianoforte, she went on to marry the Anglo-Ceylonese geologist Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy and moved to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1903. During her four years in Ceylon her interest in textiles was born - she studied and collected indigenous arts and crafts and began writing articles. When she returned to England in 1907 she began weaving and experimenting with vegetable dyes. Unusual for the time, she separated from her first husband and later married Peter Mairet - together they were part of artistic communities in England until they finally settled in Ditchling in 1914. Here they built their home and workshop, Gospels, where Mairet took on apprentices throughout the 1920s and 1930s - 130 in all were trained in the art of weaving using natural fibres and vegetable dyes. Mairet became well known for the fabrics she produced - using high quality wool, silk and cotton yarns - to produce materials for soft furnishings and clothes.

Mairet was a woman with great energy - while she was weaving, dying and instructing her apprentices in how to hone their handicraft skills – she also wrote six books and went on to establish Ditchling as an international centre for the revival of hand woven textiles and vegetable dyes. The unusual and pioneering life of Ethel Mairet (1872-1952) is celebrated in a talk by Beryl Trant on Saturday. KA