Frazer Hay in conversation with Shoshana Stewart, as part of 10 Stories for 10 Years.
On a Spring morning, I met Shoshana Stewart, President of Turquoise Mountain, at her home in South Kensington, London. I arrived carrying a bunch of sunflowers, glad (instinctively) that I had brought them. They felt right for the house; I was certain they would find a place in the sun.
I stepped into a dining space filled with natural light, its high ceilings framing a room surrounded by artworks, artefacts and handmade furniture gathered from across the world. Nothing felt arranged for display or curated for effect. It was lived in. Loved.
A vast Afghan carpet hung along one wall, splendid in colour and pattern, dense with craftsmanship and care. It felt almost biographical, carrying stories in its weave.
On the floor lay another extraordinary carpet, one designed to reflect Shoshana’s own family and their shared adventures. Spirit animals populated its surface: Shoshana the giraffe; her eldest son, a wolf; her youngest, a bear; her father-in-law, a dragon; her father, a ship; her husband, a monkey. It was playful and intimate, deeply rooted in tradition, heritage not simply preserved, but lived.
At the centre of the room stood a large timber table. A well-used children’s atlas lay open across both pages, the world spread flat between morning coffee and toys. Beside it lay a pair of Pokémon cards. This was a place that spoke of travel, education, storytelling and family, not as abstract values, but as daily practice.
On the table were newly delivered cardboard boxes marked GLASS FROM PALESTINE. They seemed perfectly natural sitting there.
As I waited, I was struck by the atmosphere. This was not a museum. Why would it be? Not a diplomatic salon either. Not a showroom for global craftsmanship. I had been to enough places where important people lived to expect some combination of the three. Instead, it was simply a home. The objects were not curated artefacts; they were part of family life, bearing the marks of use, conversation and memory.
When Shoshana entered the room (tall, elegant, calm), she carried a presence that was both practical and warm. Professional without formality. Substantial without performance. We moved into the living space for the interview.
There, beneath a remarkable olive tree in a vast clay pot, with fresh air drifting through open windows, we sat with coffee and began to talk. The proportions of the room were generous, but the atmosphere was intimate. The high ceilings did not diminish the sense of closeness. The artwork felt like ‘quiet participants’ in the conversation. The furniture (solid, restored and well-loved) stood on rediscovered timber floors.
It felt like an entirely appropriate setting in which to discuss cultural heritage. Not heritage as spectacle or fragile relic, but heritage as lived value: embedded in everyday life, family, craft and continuity.
It was ten in the morning. We clipped on microphones, settled into our chairs, and I began:
‘So, Shoshana, what’s your personal best for 2,000 metres on the erg?’
Not a traditional opening to a conversation about cultural protection. But perhaps entirely fitting.
Because if one thing became clear over the next hour, it was that Shoshana is, at heart, a crew person, someone who believes in rhythm, endurance, collective effort and the discipline of pulling together.
She rowed seriously when she was young, eventually becoming both stroke and captain. The appeal of rowing, she says, was never only about competition. It was about the experience of shared movement: the moment when eight people apply effort in perfect rhythm, and the boat seems to glide forward effortlessly.
‘I am a group and team person,’ she told me. ‘I’m not a particularly authoritarian leader. I love getting a group of people to do something together.’
That instinct appeared early.
When Shoshana moved schools at sixteen, she discovered the new school had no rowing team. Rather than accept the absence, she helped create one. With the support of her mother and a newly graduated coach, she organised a rowing club from scratch. Equipment had to be improvised; at one point, the team transported an eight-person shell in two pieces on the roof of an Oldsmobile station wagon known affectionately as the ‘Showboat’.
Looking back, she recognises the experience as formative. It was her first real attempt to turn an idea into reality, bringing people together, organising resources and creating something that did not previously exist. It also revealed a connection she would only later recognise more clearly: the relationship between discipline in sport and discipline in craft.
Both require patience. Both involve failure. Both involve a continual movement toward improvement that never quite reaches perfection.
‘I hadn’t connected them before,’ she reflected. ‘But the discipline and the failure, the exercise of moving toward perfection without ever getting there, is the same.’
Rowing provides one form of focus. Craft provides another.
In both cases, the mind becomes absorbed in the rhythm of the activity. The outside world fades for a while. Attention narrows to movement, material and task. For Shoshana, that connection has become increasingly clear through the artisans Turquoise Mountain works with across Afghanistan, Myanmar, Jordan and Palestine.
‘There is something special about making,’ she said. ‘It occupies your mind in a wonderful way.’
That focus takes on particular significance in places affected by conflict or instability. Workshops become spaces of concentration and dignity when the outside world is uncertain. Craft provides income, certainly, but also something less measurable: calm, purpose and beauty.
This conviction has been tested repeatedly in recent years, through COVID-19, the coup in Myanmar, the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, and continuing conflict and instability across the Middle East. In each case, the question becomes brutally clear: when everything else is under threat, does this work still matter?
Her answer is emphatic. Yes, but only if it is real.
For Turquoise Mountain, the economic dimension of heritage work must function. People must be able to earn, trade and support their families. Yet Shoshana is equally insistent that it is not only about income. Something deeper happens through making.
In times of upheaval, when movement is restricted, economies collapse, and fear enters daily life, the act of making can become one of the last spaces of agency and concentration.
She gave the example of Myanmar, where some artisans have been forced to flee their homes amid armed conflict and natural disasters that have beset the country in recent years. Turquoise Mountain works with women weavers from rural ethnic minority communities across Chin, Kachin, Rakhine, Shan, and Kayah States, and supports weavers living in camps for internally displaced people outside the capital Yangon. Like Kyar May Phyu, a weaver from Rakhine state: ‘We had to basically abandon our homes and move forward. At present in [the] Yangon camp, I have come to feel more at home as time passed by. It is a blessing that I still get to weave my traditional backstrap [looms], sometimes even more creative designs.’
Alongside that economic necessity was something more profound: the sustaining value of craft itself. The focus, the rhythm, the reduction of chaos into skilled attention. The act of bringing something beautiful into a brutalised world.
‘I do think that craft in the midst of conflict has been this really interesting kind of unicorn,’ she said. ‘Income, mindfulness, making, beauty, a little bit of joy. Where else are you going to find it?’
This is also one of the clearest expressions of why the Cultural Protection Fund exists.
Established in 2016 as the UK’s main response to international cultural heritage protection, the Fund was created at a moment when the destruction of places such as Palmyra forced a renewed reckoning with what cultural loss means. Led by the British Council in partnership with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Fund supports organisations working to safeguard cultural heritage at risk while contributing to social stability and economic opportunity.
For Shoshana, the premise is fundamentally sound because it recognises something essential about being human.
‘The idea that art, culture and heritage are a luxury and are secondary must be challenged,’ she said. ‘We don’t exist just to eat and survive.’
That thought sits at the heart of her work.
