Usually attired in a sedate dark suit jacket, simple blouse, and conservative slacks, Tu Meh is a superbly talented refugee weaver originally from Burma/ Myanmar. She is from the Karenni ethnic minority society and speaks that language as her usual means of communication; she prefers it to English, which she has studied but does not use very much. Tu Meh is now in her sixties and has recently moved back to Worcester after several years living with her close family in a home they had purchased about a 40 minutes drive from the city. We discovered that she felt that that smaller town was just too isolated and rural for her. She did not have any of her Karenni weaver friends nearby to chat with. So, since she had many friends from Burma and also in the wider RAW artisan community in Worcester, she has now moved back to the ”bright lights.” Tu Meh presently lives with a son and daughter-in-law and their family in the Grafton Hill neighborhood of Worcester. In charge of her own geographical decisions, Tu Meh is a woman with an independent spirit and this definitely animates her artistry with textiles.
Tu Meh weaves scarves for sale through RAW on a back strap loom, sitting on the floor with her loom drawn toward her, secured tightly to a heavy piece of furniture a few feet away.. This sets up the tension on the loom and the backstrap piece against her lower back allows her to pull the warps back until they are taut. Tu Meh often sets up her loom at craft fairs around town, when RAW has a sales table there. This allows potential buyers to see how the cloths are woven. Tu Meh has also demonstrated her weaving work in places such as the hallway outside the art gallery at Holy Cross, when Susan Rodgers has guest curated exhibitions on handloom weavings from Indonesia and Malaysia.
Another place Tu Meh set up her loom to show onlookers how it worked was on the floor in a commons room at the First Baptist Church, Worcester in December 2022. RAW was selling the artisans’ goods there during a Christmas craft fair and Ellen Ferrante and Joan Kariko of RAW has asked several of the crafters to demonstrate their art making activities during the holiday fair. In this instance Tu Meh had secured her loom to a leg of a heavy folding table. She then sat on the floor and wove for over an hour with several congregants gathered around.
In the refugee camp along the Thai/Burma border, Tu Meh wove in the camp’s craft house. Residents were obligated to try to raise cash for their household needs and weaving was one of Tu Meh’s means to do that. The colors of thread she used at that time, however, were fairly restricted by the available supply provided by the camp staff. In consequence Tu Meh’s textiles were relatively subdued (in motif structures as well in hue). But, her weaving technique was already excellent by this point in her life as an artisan. She counted her warps and weft threads with great care to make her motif patterns (fairly standardized Karenni ones at that time, while in the camp). The tightness and exactitude of her weaving was already striking.
Once Tu Meh arrived in Worcester, however, and once she teamed up with Ellen and Joan of RAW and had discovered their willingness to provide her with any color and type of thread she might want, her weavings exploded in creativity. Now she weaves in a vast array of hues and is experimenting with silk blend threads, bamboo fibers, polyester blends, and even shiny metallic wefts, going well beyond the standard cotton threads. In fact, her textiles are so varied in motif combinations and colors that Ellen and Joan constructed a large bamboo frame with three horizontal beams for the 2020 Worcester Center for Crafts exhibition, “Crafting a New Home: Refugee Artisans of Worcester.” Onto each bamboo rung we hung 10 of Tu Meh’s scarves, each one different from the others. This propulsive textile creativity on her part contradicts the stereotypic notion that refugees are somehow downtrodden, depressed, and defeated.
