His Background
Azizbek Gulyamov is the driving force and “director” behind all the beautiful Suzanis in our Cape Town Collection, and my dear friend for 12 years now since I first saw the image of the Suzani that he posted on a Textile Blog. We have since worked and travelled a long road together to share this Beauty to the world. I have the highest regard and respect for the body of work that he has achieved with his group of artists, and feel extremely privileged to be able to share them with lovers of true textile art.
Sadly since 2019 no future Suzanis have been commissioned and production has had to stop because the costs involved have become too high to produce these pure traditional Suzanis. Our Suzanis used only pure silk for embroidering and each Suzani was embroidered by one woman per Suzani.
Synthetic Suzani copies of our work, made in haste by groups of women for the tourist market has made it very difficult to market our beautiful expensive works of art. More and more affordable viscose copies and even printed works have flooded the market.
He grew up during the Soviet time and still lives in Bukhara, and has been passionately involved in the drive to revive Suzani embroidery since Independence during the early 90’s. While he was growing up traditional Suzani embroidery was strictly discouraged, in favour of machine made export embroideries. Families treasured their inherited Suzanis and women kept embroidering armlets to wear and to practice the age-old traditional embroidery skills they had learned from their mothers.
Since the Independence of Uzbekistan from Russia it has been a profound joy in Central Asia that women are free to embroider their traditional Suzanis and celebrate again the magic of true Central Asian Suzani creation.
In his childhood home embroidery work was highly cherished, and this memory enchanted and inspired him into doing the conserving work he does now to help keep this art alive.
After Independence he lived and studied in Germany for 8 years. Whilst living there he researched and furthered his knowledge of antique Suzani history and design online, in museums and in private collections around the world. He returned to Bukhara to set out on his dream and passion to contribute to the revived drive to create traditional Suzanis from as he called it “Noble Bukhara”
He built his own team over time. His inspiration and designs came from his research of antique Suzanis. He stresses that he interprets ( not copies ) this inspiration into new adapted beauties. A very important starting point was to find the best graphic designer to draw the designs on Adras, this takes immense skill. A Suzani can only be a success if the underlying drawing is perfect. Few artists are trained to do these very specialised Suzani design drawings. It was always the task of an older woman, called “the kalamkash” in the family who knew the family designs and secrets, to draw the underlying design of a Suzani for the embroiderer to follow.
Different graphic designers, mostly male artists have done this first drawing line work with Azizbek. They worked together to prepare the drawn on cloth for the embroiderers to then work her magic in needle and silk. It is also her art to decide the distribution and balance of the colours used.
The silks and Adras are still woven in bolts by families in home industries. The silk background used for our Suzanis, was developed by Azizbek. He was the first one to commision embroideries to be done on this textile. He asked his weavers to combine silk with a cotton backing to improve its strength for the embroidery work. This “Atlas” silk textile is now widely used for Suzani embroidery.
The silk threads are produced by other home industries and the natural dyeing and colouring of the threads is produced by yet another group. Each group keeps their family’s age old trade secrets locked away from outsiders.
He had to search for suitable team of carefully selected older women embroiderers from the villages who learned the art of Suzani embroidery in craft schools after Independence, to do the hand embroidery for his Suzani projects. He insists that each individual Suzani is embroidered by one artist only, otherwise there is not a good consistency in the stitching. When a group of women work and stitch together on a Suzani it does not have this stamp of “a work of art “ to its name. The female world of real embroidery artists in the hill towns and villages is very secretive and private too and strictly controlled with its very own rules.