Sarah Faulkner at the Vintage and Classic Car Collection at the Orchard Palace in Gondal, Gujarat, India on a trip with Dr. Cathleen Cummings and the Birmingham Museum of Art’s Indian Cultural Society in December 2016.

Editor’s Note: For the 2018-2019 academic year, UAB had record number of students and alumni selected for the prestigious Fulbright Student Program, the flagship international exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. Four of the six award recipients are from the UAB College of Arts and Sciences, including Sarah Faulkner. Native to Birmingham, Alabama, Faulkner has been awarded a Fulbright Study/Research grant to conduct research on the Lepcha people and their art in Sikkim, India. Faulkner graduated from UAB in 2017 with bachelors' degrees in art history and sociology.

We’re excited to feature monthly posts from Sarah as she chronicles her Fulbright experience, which begins later this month in India.

When you prepare to move to another country for nine months, you pack a lot of clothes.

Clothes for a spectrum of weather conditions, clothes for an array of potential outings. T-shirts, blouses, dresses, and jeans. Jackets, raincoats, sweaters, sweatpants. Struggling with the zipper to your bursting luggage, you may find yourself confronted with a fact that you may have taken for granted before: clothes are truly sewn into the fabric of our lives.

Besides protecting us from the elements, clothes are a means of expression for multiple facets—one's identity. They convey messages about the person we are and the person we want to be, the communities we ascribe to, and the nuances and heritage of the culture we hail from. Even the words we use for different garments are an expression of our identity. Textiles are integral to our daily lives and their consequential relation to our cultural identity inspired the research project that I am traveling to India to complete on a Fulbright fellowship.

My research centers around the Lepcha community of Sikkim, a lush and culturally-diverse northeastern state in India that is nestled into the Himalayas. The Lepcha (also known as the Rongkup and Rongpa) are indigenous to Sikkim. Despite their native roots, however, they only make up about 13 percent of the total Sikkimese population. This marginalization can be attributed in part to the dispersion of the Lepcha from their homeland and into surrounding areas, but it is largely the result of the influx of other cultures into Sikkim from Nepal, Tibet, and the rest of the Indian subcontinent. Despite this and the pressures of globalization, the Lepcha continue to maintain their distinct cultural heritage and identity, in part through continuing to produce their traditional crafts.

My project, tentatively titled, "Hemmed into the Hills of Sikkim: A Comprehensive Record of Traditional Lepcha Textiles," aims to extend our understanding of the Lepcha people and their handloom crafts. I also hope it will add to ongoing conservation efforts as I will be cataloging and compiling a comprehensive, illustrated pattern book that will record the attributes, functions, and production processes of traditional textiles currently being made by Lepcha artisans in Sikkim. Although efforts have been made by scholars to record other aspects of Lepcha heritage, this project will bridge a gap in research on traditional Lepcha loin-loom woven textiles, which constitute an essential facet of the Lepcha culture and Lepcha daily life. I also aim to highlight Sikkim as a whole, as it is a state that is relatively understudied by the art historical community or is otherwise merely lumped in with the rest of the Himalayas in scholarly studies.

Since this is a large project to undertake, I am thankful that my experiences as an undergraduate student at UAB have prepared me to research and catalogue textiles. My internship as a collections assistant for Christina McClellan at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts (AEIVA), my assistantship with Kimberly Schnormeier in the Department of Theatre with cataloguing UAB's historical costume collection, and my subsequent exhibition—produced under the guidance of Professor Schnormeier and Dr. Jessica Dallow of the Department of Art and Art History—all worked together to give me the skills and motivation to research and catalogue Lepcha textiles.

More than anything, my experiences at UAB have fostered an appreciation for textile arts and the stories they can tell. I will be keeping you all posted with what I learn during my Fulbright fellowship with monthly blogposts, and through this, I hope my project will promote an understanding of Lepcha culture and even foster a similar appreciation for textiles as you follow my journey through Sikkim.

For now, though, I must focus on packing more clothes.