Sheila Paine (29 September 1929–March 2022) was an English expert on

Islamic embroidery Embroidery was an important art in the Islamic world from the beginning of Islam until the Industrial Revolution disrupted traditional ways of life. Overview Early Islam took over societies where the embroidery of clothes for both sexes an ...

. She was known for her travel books including ''The Afghan Amulet'', describing her efforts to find the "linen goddess", an embroidered motif found from Greece to central Asia, and the origins of an elaborately embroidered "Kohistan" dress she had seen in a dealer's shop in London. Her work was exhibited at the

Pitt Rivers Museum Pitt Rivers Museum is a museum displaying the archaeological and anthropological collections of the University of Oxford in England. The museum is located to the east of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and can only be accessed t ...

, Oxford.

Biography

Early life

Sheila Paine was born on 29 September 1929 in

Balham Balham () is an area in south London, England, mostly within the London Borough of Wandsworth with small parts within the neighbouring London Borough of Lambeth. The area has been settled since Saxon times and appears in the Domesday Book as B ...

to Barbara Sykes and the quantity surveyor Edgar Thorpe. She was educated at Nonsuch Grammar School and London's

Lycée Français The Agency for French Education Abroad, or Agency for French Teaching Abroad, (french: Agence pour l'enseignement français à l'étranger; abbreviation: AEFE), is a national public agency under the administration of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ...

. 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 Leslie Paine. They returned to England, married in 1953, and had four children. She resumed her education at

Oxford Polytechnic Polytechnic is most commonly used to refer to schools, colleges, or universities that qualify as an institute of technology or vocational university also sometimes called universities of applied sciences. Polytechnic may also refer to: Educatio ...

(now Oxford Brookes University), eventually becoming a teacher of modern languages there. She began to collect English

sampler Sampler may refer to: * Sampler (signal), a digital signal processing device that converts a continuous signal to a discrete signal * Sampler (needlework), a handstitched piece of embroidery used to demonstrate skill in needlework * Sampler (surna ...

s, her first venture into the study of textiles.

Travels in search of embroidery

Leslie Paine was killed on

Turkish Airlines Flight 981 Turkish Airlines Flight 981 was a scheduled flight from Istanbul Yeşilköy Airport to London Heathrow Airport, with an intermediate stop at Orly Airport in Paris. On 3 March 1974, the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 operating the flight crashed into ...

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 Islam (; ar, ۘالِإسلَام, , ) is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion centred primarily around the Quran, a religious text considered by Muslims to be the direct word of God (or '' Allah'') as it was revealed to Muhammad, the mai ...

and other embroidery. 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 An amulet, also known as a good luck charm or phylactery, is an object believed to confer protection upon its possessor. The word "amulet" comes from the Latin word amuletum, which Pliny's ''Natural History'' describes as "an object that protects ...

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 book The genre of travel literature encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs. One early travel memoirist in Western literature was Pausanias (geographer), Pausanias, a Greek geographer of the 2nd century CE. In ...

s, ''The Afghan Amulet'' in 1994, ''The Golden Horde'' in 1997, and ''The Linen Goddess'' in 2003. Coming to the attention of museum authorities in charge of textile collections, she wrote books for the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

on textiles from India and from Pakistan. 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

, 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. An exhibition of textiles from her journeys, ''Stitch of a Symbol'', was held at the Pitt Rivers Museum from August 2016 to February 2017. 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. She died aged 92 in March 2022.

Works

* * * *

References

External links

42 objects acquired from Sheila Payne
in the

collection {{DEFAULTSORT:Paine, Sheila 1929 births 2022 deaths Embroidery People from Balham 20th-century British women writers 21st-century British women writers Art collectors from London Women art collectors Writers from London 20th-century travel writers 21st-century travel writers