Samunnat Volume 43.4
“Ubreico” technique demonstration. This color technique using scraps enables them to use every bit of polymer clay. FLOWER PINS using slices from the “Ubreico” technique demonstrating one way of using it. Each woman made her own pin and kept it. Photographs by Kathleen Dustin. Middle: KATHLEEN DUSTIN, WENDY MOORE, KOPILA BASNET, AND Lila Khadka, their incredible office assistant.
Birtamod is far from the glittering capitals of world travel. A nondescript town of dust and concrete, it sits on the lone highway in eastern Nepal, surrounded by distant mountains that are home to several tribal groups. Like most of the country, the district has intractable problems of poverty and rural isolation. So how did Kathleen Dustin (Ornament Vol. 11.3, 1988, pp. 16-21; Vol. 20.4, 1997, pp. 42-47), a preeminent contemporary American polymer clay artist from half a world away, find herself in Birtamod for the first time this spring, welcomed as a dear friend? What brings her here?
“This is not about voluntourism,” declares Wendy Moore, an effervescent Australian polymer clay artist, speaking over Zoom on a spring morning in Birtamod. “It’s not about taking a plane somewhere, staying for a week to help, and then leaving.” Wendy Moore, with Nepali lawyer Kopila Basnet, are the cofounders of Samunnat Inc. (a Nepali word meaning “to thrive, to flourish”). For the past seventeen years, Samunnat has empowered women escaping violence, abuse and human trafficking. Kopila Basnet spends most of her time in court with property or divorce applications. Wendy Moore has had connections to Nepal most of her life, starting with her parents taking the family on a trekking trip there in 1975. Ever since, as she puts it, she would be “buggering off” to Nepal to visit. In 2006, she and her husband, Malcolm Moore, a doctor, were living in eastern Nepal when a chance meeting with Kopila, who saw Wendy sitting on a verandah stringing polymer beads, lead to Samunnat Inc. and the transforming power of art and community.
Kopila asked, and Wendy agreed to train some women to make jewelry, starting with local beads, so they could earn an income. The Moores had no illusions about how effective foreign aid was, especially where corruption is endemic. “All the time we see lots of projects which Westerners have set up in Nepal that fail,” Moore says. “I have always said, I absolutely refuse to join something that had been set up by a Westerner.” The Moores decided to give it twelve months. They stayed four years, with Moore going every other week to a rented room (even, at one point, a garage) to work with the women. One day they noticed her wearing a polymer clay necklace. The women told her, “If you can make that, we can do it, and it will be different from the other beads made in Nepal.” After the Moores returned to Australia, they continued the informal arrangement, coming to Nepal twice a year.
“The emphasis we really want is [that] women are changing their lives. That’s the bottom line,” Moore says. “These are women who have made the extraordinarily brave decision to leave a marriage, or to change a situation, to come to Samunnat to ask for help. Fortunately we have an excellent relationship with the police, who refer a lot of the women who come here. Women get married at a much younger age in Nepal and marriages are arranged,” Moore continues. “One of the biggest economic impacts now is that, because it is such a poor country, many of the men are going overseas to the Arab states to work. They go for three years or more, and if they have not had a son in Nepal, that may be enough reason to more or less abandon their wives, who are older, often with female children.”
SAMUNNAT WOMEN celebrating the opening of the new center, 2013.
Hundreds of Nepali women have passed through Samunnat’s care, which provides different programs according to each woman’s needs. They teach sewing skills for women to set up their own tailoring shops; they train in small-scale catering (in demand at family festivals); they show them crop management; and they started a micro-finance cooperative which runs separately. Moore grins as she mentions they recently published two cheerful, color-illustrated sex education books, in English and Nepali, sold around the country. The polymer clay group members, around ten to fifteen women, have stayed more or less permanently, adding new members who show interest and aptitude. Running a business is part of what they do. “They are the ones monitoring the stock; they are the ones fulfilling the orders. The polymer clay comes from America [there is none in Nepal or India, and the clay from China is inferior], which takes six weeks to arrive,” Moore says. They use Kato Polyclay, importantly because it is phthalate-free, avoiding one of the horrors of plastic. Nothing is wasted. Damaged or misshapen beads get recycled inside newly-made beads.
Word about Samunnat spread around the close-knit network of the international polymer clay community, impressed by the quality of the jewelry, the hard work and the values of empowering women. The internet, and social media—Instagram, in particular—lead to vital and useful connections. Christine Dumont, a European polymer clay artist, came to Samunnat and has been a devoted supporter ever since. Cynthia Tinapple, an artist who writes Polymer Clay Daily, an encyclopedic online newsletter read worldwide by polymer artists, visited (she brought a slicing machine in her suitcase). She and artist Ron Lehocky started a fund-raising campaign for Samunnat, to help them construct their own building, for $12,000. Members of the U.S.-based International Polymer Clay Association contributed more funding. In 2013, Samunnat celebrated a permanent new home, with light-filled studios, temporary accommodation for about ten women, a tailoring shop, and office space. Samunnat Inc. was registered in 2014 as an Australian NGO [non-governmental organization], which handles jewelry shipping and distribution and funnels the money back, keeping enough to buy more clay supplies. In November 2022, the women held a Zoom meeting with a Facebook group called Polymer Artists of Australia and New Zealand.
THE SAMUNNAT CENTER was built in 2013. It has temporary accommodations for up to ten women, along with studios, a tailoring shop and office space.
They loved the recognition and validation coming from other polymer artists. Kathleen Dustin exhibited their work at the 2022 Smithsonian Craft2Wear Show, as a collaboration between herself and Samunnat, which won the coveted Judy Lynn Prince Award. Samunnat’s polymer clay jewelry sales via the website (Samunnat.co), retail outlets in Australia and Europe, and increasingly in America, currently account for 90% of the entire organization’s income.
In 2020, back home in Canberra, Wendy Moore decided to treat herself to a pair of Kathleen Dustin earrings. Via the internet, they got to talking. Dustin had seen how technically advanced the Samunnat women were, particularly their fine millefiore polymer clay beads. “I was starting to retire from doing shows,” Dustin recalls. She offered to teach the women some more shapes. Then the Covid pandemic hit, and with it arrived the time and distance-collapsing legerdemain of Zoom. In 2021, Dustin held her first Zoom class with Samunnat. “I was sitting in my studio thinking: I can’t believe this,” she says. “Here I am at midnight in New Hampshire; there’s Wendy, in Australia, who is translating at two in the afternoon the next day (across the International Date Line); and there’s the Samunnat women, in front of Kopila’s laptop at 10 in the morning the next day—and we’re talking!”
KATHLEEN DUSTIN AND THE SAMUNNAT POLYMER ARTISTS discussing designs, 2023.
Dustin has held online classes with Samunnat, averaging every other week, from that point on. She taught using video tutorials: “I had my iPhone up above my hands, showing them how to do something, and then after the classes they would go practice. Or sometimes I would make a diagram on paper, on how to do a certain kind of technique, for instance, and email it to Kopila, who would print it out for them.” But it was not until she worked with them face-to-face in Birtamod that Dustin, as Wendy Moore had before her, was confronted by the difficulties of teaching and learning across cultures. She had told herself, “I can handle cultural differences! I’ve lived overseas, for years, in other countries—Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.” But it was tough. Teaching about creativity addresses fundamental issues of self-identity. Explaining to the women how to use their own inspiration was incredibly hard to communicate and mind-bogglingly hard to grasp. “They’re smart women, they’re resilient, they’re resourceful, and they were good at asking questions. [Yet] It is an excruciatingly slow process, to get them to understand that they can come up with something on their own, by themselves,” Dustin says.
As Moore explains, these women started from nothing; schooling for girls in Nepal stops about the age of 12 or 13, and some Samunnat women are illiterate. Their situations become extremely bad—or dangerous—before women seek help. In a Zoom conversation via an interpreter, Gita Shrestha remembers, “I was very scared coming to Samunnat. When my mother- and father-in-law died, I did not know how to do anything... I couldn’t even go shopping for food. Samunnat made me strong.” Pramila Acharya found herself overwhelmed. “My mother was very sick. I felt I was the only one responsible to look after her and the other children. But I needed to earn money. I came to Kopila twice. I’m very happy now; I have an income. I’m more confident and can say what I think.” She smiles because, she says, they understand some English too. Fear trapped Sharmila Khadka: “I was stuck in a violent situation in my family.” Although they lived quite far away, Sharmila’s mother came to Kopila, who offered Sharmila a place to stay and work at Samunnat. An important difference for their sense of autonomy is that the women are paid a regular wage as soon as they start, and not a pittance for piece-work, as is often the case. “There’s a saying in Nepal: When you’re born you depend on your father; when you’re a woman you depend on your husband; when you die you depend on your son,” Moore says. “Several of them do remarry. But they’ve gained self-esteem; they have their own resources.”
It was a massive venture into the unknown. “Everything in Nepali art is learned by rote, or memorizing [as in many countries]. They had to learn to trust their own ideas,” Wendy Moore continues. “To hear us Westerners bang on about ‘voice’ and ‘expression’ meant they had to take a huge leap to understand that. And... we had to remind them that it is okay to make mistakes. In the Nepali education system, if you make a mistake you are shamed in front of the classroom. The women were terribly afraid to get things wrong. They would ask me, ‘Is this what you wanted?’ I had to explain that it’s not about what I want.” Dustin, during her three-week visit, says she realized “that in their culture, they are not taught how to have their own ideas; or that their own ideas are even valuable... When we first started in person, I asked them to draw a ‘u’ shape, as many and as fast as they could—it didn’t matter what it looked like—on a sheet of paper. We could tell that they were so uncomfortable and scared doing that...” Dustin adds thoughtfully, “It was probably more of a growing experience for me than it was for them.”
SPICE MARKET MALA (necklace) of translucent polymer and spices, 2021. Note how you can actually see the granules of individual spices speckled throughout the necklace!
What they are learning together cuts both ways. Moore began to question if the idea of individual artistic ownership was a Western concept that did not fit. As she has written elsewhere, she would see a piece and ask, “This is wonderful! Whose idea was this?” The women would respond with huge smiles and say “We all did, didi! We thought [of] it together!” (didi, “elder sister,” is a term of respect). Kathleen Dustin still “believes in the idea of personal creativity. That’s an emphasis we have, in America especially. But it’s almost as if we are going in as Big White Western Saviors, and that’s not right... I’ve come to appreciate now that other cultures have community expression. One of the things I really liked about Samunnat is how they seemed to come up with ideas as a team. One person might try something, and show it to the others. They’ll say, ‘That’s great; let’s try this, let’s try that…’ They cannot claim it individually. I think that is most authentic for them, to get ideas together, and they accept us as part of the team.”
During the Zoom classes, Dustin was always seeking ways to get the women to look at what was familiar and everyday around them, and see inspiration. She asked them to go search for dirt in different colors around Birtamod. They went out, and collected dirt in a creamy white, a grey and a terracotta shade, which became the colors of the Earth necklace. “I knew you could take translucent polymer—it looks like candle wax—that becomes the color of whatever you mix into it. The Spice Market necklace has pepper in it, and coriander seed speckles; the yellow is turmeric, and another is from chili powder. This is a well-known concept in the polymer community, but for them to go to the local spice market and look at the colors of the spices, instead of thinking about the flavor or the smell—that was all new.” Dustin calls the process a “guided discovery,” in that it had the added advantage of getting the women to see the beauty in more subdued colors, which appeal to Western tastes.
DHAKA TEXTILES WITH POLYMER SWATCHES laid on top. Each sample is inscribed with the color values used to come up with the appropriate color. POLYMER CANES inspired by the dhaka textiles shown above, 2023. Notice how each cane uses different combinations of the polymer swatches. Photographs by Wendy Moore.
SAMUNNAT ARTISTS making polymer color swatches, carefully noting on each sample the color values.
Color was a daunting frontier. “Nepalis love bling, they love shiny, they love embellished,” Moore explains. “They adore very yellow [24-karat] gold, and their favorite colors that they gravitate to and would wear themselves are yellow, green and red. This is not a town where tourists come, so Samunnat women don’t see what Westerners wear.” The concept of mixing colors, intended to help them develop a wider range, was almost too bewildering. Moore showed them how to combine yellow and blue clay to make green: Nobody could fathom it. She devised a foundational palette of magenta, cyan, yellow, black and white, which harmonize very well together, to get them started. “We thrashed it out,” she says. “They’ve learned how to think about mixing color, very much informed by the BreakThroughColour [sic] cards of Tracy Holmes.” The women can create their own color recipes independently; Dustin has since taught them a different application of the Skinner blending technique, as another way to approach color. With more assurance, the women are willing to take risks, and are setting aside one day a month “to play,” with the clay together, to feel the freedom to experiment and explore.
About five years ago, they started to draw deep from their own culture. “It’s been an interesting kind of dance,” Moore recalls, “to say okay, what are the elements of your culture that you love and that say something to you, and bottom line: what’s going to sell? Some of the very first beads we sold were based on mehndi (an ancient form of body art, using henna paste to make decorative designs on hands and feet).” Inspiration from dhaka, for instance, was a happy discovery. A beloved fabric worn everywhere in the country, dhaka is proudly associated with Nepali identity and can reflect strong regional differences. It can be factory produced with synthetics, but the most desirable dhaka is an exquisite handwoven cotton with supplementary-weft inlay in countless different stepped-diamond motifs. The more complex the pattern, the more expensive; men’s hats (topi) are exclusively dhaka, and women wear it in skirts or draped as shoulder cloths. The beauty of dhaka is that it is so varied, with colors galore, and yet profoundly traditional. “Even the polymer canes are inspired by dhaka designs—triangular shapes, especially,” Moore points out. Later on, Sharmila Khadka is clearly delighted to describe a design inspired by the tilhari, a classical, intricate gold ornament worn on a necklace by all married Nepali women. The women love to make a disc-like, slightly curved bead Dustin suggested, because it resembles a thali, a wide brass pan they use every day to serve dal baht [lentils and rice]. More recently Samunnat artists have created a beautiful brooch based on the rhododendron, the national flower of Nepal. “They came up with adding stripes in one place instead of polka dots, or making the petals more spread out, or altering the sizes—that’s the kind of thinking and collaboration they’re doing now,” Dustin adds, looking justifiably excited. “They are paying attention to their heritage, which is essential.”
Samunnat is evolving in ways no one anticipated. Despite very little legal aid or pro-bono help anywhere in Nepal, more women are taking action, at the same time as the incidences of violence against women have gone up. Kopila Basnet is looking to add another woman lawyer, and psycho-social counselors, to the staff. Kathleen Dustin has been handling orders and shipping for America, but plans to find someone to take on those responsibilities. Does Samunnat’s success serve as an example for other Western artists who want to share skills? The internet, with websites, and Zoom, and Instagram, opens up enormous possibilities. Crucially, it also offers a global market. But, says Dustin, “You have to be in it for the long haul. I feel like I am mentoring them; I’m not waltzing in with my own ideas, but helping them to come up with their own. It’s a real commitment.” She continues to hold classes on Zoom, and expects to go back to Birtamod. Wendy Moore underscores the concerted efforts needed for the almost unimaginable shifts in personal, mental and social landscapes to mold a new sense of self. “Samunnat wants these women to grow into an independent business, be able to feed their kids, pay their medical and educational expenses, afford their own place to live, and even support their elderly parents. For real, effective change like that you need to have sustained relationships.” It takes trust, community, time, and patience.
You can learn more about Samunnat by visiting their website, www.Samunnat.co. This includes an online shop where you can purchase work made by the women of Samunnat.
SUGGESTED READING
Benesh, Carolyn L.E. “Kathleen Dustin. The Journey Within.” Ornament, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1997.
DeDominicis, Jill A. “Polymer Clay. A Modern Medium Comes of Age.” Ornament, Vol. 34, No. 4, 2011.
Dustin, Kathleen. “The Use of Polyform in Bead-Making.” Ornament, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1988.
Gabriel, Hannelore. “Nepalese Nine Bead Necklaces.” Ornament, Vol. 27, No. 2, 2003.
Scherer, Alice. “Dan Adams and Cynthia Toops. A Marriage of Media.” Ornament, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1997.
Leslie Clark is a freelance writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with an interest in textiles and ethnic arts. While researching the article about Kathleen Dustin and her work with the women of Samunnat, in Nepal, Clark was impressed by how an international community of polymer clay artists helped create a continuously supportive environment, both personal and practical, to women at a crossroads between old social expectations and figuring out new lives through a modern art medium. In spite of power outages, the pandemic, huge distances, language snafus, and cultural quandaries, Samunnat’s story is one of rare good news.
