Sheila Paine

Sheila Paine (29 September 1929 – March 2022) was an English expert on Islamic embroidery. 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, Oxford.

Biography

Early life

Sheila Paine was born on 29 September 1929 in Balham to Barbara Sykes and the quantity surveyor Edgar Thorpe. She was educated at Nonsuch Grammar School and London's Lycée Français. 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 a mining engineer, Leslie Paine. They returned to England, married in 1953, and had four children. She resumed her education at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University), eventually becoming a teacher of modern languages there. She began to collect English samplers, her first venture into the study of textiles.

Travels in search of embroidery

Paine travelled throughout central Asia, visiting places such as Mazar-i-Sharif, with its historic blue mosque.

Leslie Paine was killed on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 when it crashed near Paris in 1974. Remaking her life, Sheila Paine began to travel to "the remotest of places" She was often given textiles by women she met: "Headbands, a child's cap or a jerkin would be thrust into her hands. Payment was often refused". Coming to the attention of museum authorities in charge of textile collections, she wrote books for the British Museum on textiles from India and from Pakistan. 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.

Works