ARTIST
KACHAMA PEREZ
Kachama Perez is a Chiang Mai based weaving artist in Thailand. She was born in Bangkok to a mother who sewed many of her own clothes and passed on to her daughter a deep and lasting love for the charm of handcrafted textiles. Once she was old enough, Kachama accompanied her father, who was a doctor, on his professional travels through many of the provinces of northern and northeastern Thailand. By meeting and talking with local villagers, she became acquainted with the distinctive traditional textiles of each region.
In the early 1990s, she went on to study at Tokyo Mode College and spent an additional three years in Japan working for a leading design company. Upon returning to Thailand, she settled in Chiang Mai where she came across the traditional fabrics made by the hill-tribe people. The beauty and richness of these fabrics resonated so deeply with Kachama that she took up weaving as the preferred medium for expressing her art.
"Weaving is one of the oldest surviving crafts. The technique traces back to the Stone Age. In civilizations all over the world, people have woven using materials they could find in their environment. As an artist living in the 21st century, I might use industrial materials, but what I do is the same as the ancestors; I create decorative textiles for homes and public spaces, and evoke positive emotions in viewers' hearts. In this regard, I identify myself as an inheritor of a tradition that carries the wisdom of the ancestors. When I see traditional textiles, I feel the weavers' hands and hearts, and I want to master everything about the techniques and approaches they use in their craft. They are an inexhaustible source of inspiration to my work."
