BOOK REVIEW: PICTURES ON SILK Milton Osborne – TAASA Review March 2009

An admirable feature of the book is the extent to which the author seeks to relate these textiles to the broader cultural life of Cambodia.

So it is that we are introduced to the use of pidan cloths within Buddhist wats, in a fashion that combined religious symbolism and decoration, as well as their use, at least anecdotally, as `pictures of heaven for the dying.’ Pictorial Cambodian Textiles by Gillian Green River Books, Bangkok 2008 rrp A$90.00 After the acclaimed success of her Traditional Textiles of Cambodia: Cultural Threads and Material Heritage, published in 2003, Gillian Green has returned to the subject of Cambodian textiles with an examination of what she describes as an extraordinary group of antique Cambodian hand woven silk textiles .

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