WSC Network

Weavers’ Service Centre is a unique organisation within the office of the Development Commissioner of Handloom under Ministry of Textiles. Started in traditional weaving hubs of the country like Mumbai and Varanasi in the 1950s, they were initially called Handloom Design Centres. Totalling 29 in number today, they aid the production of handmade textiles across India by offering design support and developing prototypes. The WSCs recognized the role of colour, texture and design in a fabric and sought to employ trained artists who could help with the production of handmade textiles. The finest flowering of this attemp was in Mumbai WSC where artists like Prabhakar Barwe, Gautam Vaghela, Pravin Vaghela, Anand Mohan Naik etc were employed to engage with the weavers and bring about changes within the traditional medium so as to be able to commercially exploit them as well. In doing so there was much experimentation, conversation, study of form and colour, and a loosening of tight compartments of art and medium. No wonder then that some of the finest pieces of Visvakarma series and consequently in Vignette, more than a quarter of them, have been developed at WSC Mumbai that are path breaking for the use of colour, technique and imagination on textiles as a medium of art.