...Jenny Balfour-Paul

Journeys in colour - textiles from around the World

Jenny Balfour-Paul – writer, artist and traveller – has researched and worked with indigo for over twenty years. Practical experience with indigo plants and dyeing (including teaching and exhibiting her own work), combined with living and working in the Middle East and North Africa, led to her PhD at Exeter University based on fieldwork in many Arab countries. This was published as Indigo in the Arab World in 1997.

Jenny’s research trips extended to Asia and Africa when British Museum Press commissioned her to write a book on Indigo worldwide (Indigo, 1998, reprint, Archetype Publications 2006). She continues to travel widely in pursuit of her research projects). Jenny writes for such journals as Geographical, and lectures and broadcasts in UK and overseas on indigo and many other textile, history and travel subjects. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at Exeter University, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, former member of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen, and founding member of the Eden Project’s Indigo team. In 2002 she exhibited her collection of Arab Costumes at Exeter University, and in 2007 had a retrospective exhibition about her influences at the Devon Guild of Craftsmen and Hove Museum and Art Gallery. She was consultant for the major touring indigo exhibition, Indigo: A Blue to Dye For, launched by the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester in January, that toured thereafter to Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery and Brighton and Hove Museums and Art Galleries.

Jenny consults worldwide for projects where natural dyestuffs are being revived for ecological reasons, and is currently completing another book based on her discovery of a Victorian traveller’s unpublished illustrated Journals.