I started ‘play­ing’ around with paint­ing on silk after being encour­aged to do so by sev­eral Subud mem­bers 15 years ago and had my first rather ama­teur­ish hang­ings used as back­drops at the fash­ion show at the World Con­gress in Amanacer. Over the years I devel­oped my own style of paint­ing on silk at the same time as bring­ing up my three chil­dren and work­ing as a nurse. I found that play­ing with colour really kept me sane as I didn’t really enjoy nurs­ing as it was very hard work and stress­ful, as well as bal­anc­ing my life style look­ing after teenage kids and dri­ving them here, there, and every­where as we lived (and still do) in a rural area.

I quickly man­aged to mar­ket my scarves and ties in about 10 out­lets in mid Wales and on the bor­der between Wales and Eng­land and even­tu­ally was a mem­ber of two co-operative art/craft shops. At the moment I only have three out­lets (one of them being a local co-operative shop) and have down­sized the busi­ness. I love the medium of silk as there is a flu­id­ity of paint­ing on it and some­times the unex­pected happens.

I come from an artis­tic fam­ily, but was sur­prised that I had a cer­tain abil­ity to be ‘arty’ all those years ago! My grandfather’s cousin was the famous artist Edward Burra. My mother was a friend of Jim Ede in the late ‘50’s (Jim left as a legacy a well known gallery in Cam­bridge called Kettle’s Yard which houses sculp­tures etc. by Gaudier Breska) and she looked after art­work belong­ing to him (such as Ben Nichol­son, Alfred Wal­lis, Gaudier Breska, etc.) for sev­eral years and she also opened the first art gallery in Cardiff and ran it until she died. My brother Lak­sar Burra, who is in Subud, did some fab glass­work with the abo­rig­ines in cen­tral Aus­tralia about 15–20 years ago and also my sis­ter Ros­aline Weil (Reigate) worked with gild­ing on mir­rors and frames for a while.

Lat­i­fah Nankivell

View Latifah’s Gallery of Silk