Barbara Sansoni

Watching the old buildings of Ceylon come down in the name of progress, Barbara Sansoni did the one thing she could do about it: she drew them. Over some thirty years she measured and recorded houses and verandahs, Buddhist temples and Dutch-period churches across the island, assembling on paper an archive of a thousand years of building that would otherwise have gone under with the wrecking crews. She was a colourist by instinct and a preserver by conviction, and both callings came from the same restless eye.

She was born on 22 April 1928 in Kandy, and educated in Ceylon and southern India before studying in England, at the Regent Street Polytechnic and the Chelsea School of Art. In 1958 she founded Barefoot, which started as a way to teach weaving to rural girls so they would hold a trade of their own, and grew into a design house known internationally for its handwoven cloth. Her subject there was colour: she built her fabrics from the play of warp against weft, and once said the loom had been her guru, teaching her about colour, and about life, what she could have learned in no other way.

The drawings were her other life’s work. From the early 1960s, extending an archive of measured drawings begun by the architect Ulrik Plesner, she set out to record the island’s vernacular architecture before it was lost: the religious and domestic buildings of the Sinhalese, the Tamils and the Muslims, and of the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British who had ruled the island in turn. Her drawings of Buddhist temples appeared in 1978 as ‘Viharas and Verandahs’. The larger survey, close to a hundred examples in all, was published in 1998 as ‘The Architecture of an Island’, with the historian Ronald Lewcock, her second husband, supplying the text and Laki Senanayake drawing alongside her.

Her work was shown well beyond Sri Lanka, from a first one-woman exhibition in London in 1966 onward, in Britain, Europe, Australia and the United States. At home she was made a Kala Suri in 2005, and in 2016 the University of the Visual and Performing Arts gave her an honorary doctorate. Through all of it she kept Barefoot, whose Colombo shop and its wash of colour became a fixture of the city.

She died in Colombo on 23 April 2022, the day after her ninety-fourth birthday. She left two archives that answer each other: bolts of handwoven colour that put a livelihood into thousands of hands, and a shelf of measured drawings that hold, on paper, the buildings the island itself let go.