Eleven days, sixty cloths: hanging Indigo

On the first morning, Room 4 was white walls, a polished floor and sixty acid-free boxes on trolleys. On the eleventh evening, two hundred guests walked in. In between, a team of nine did almost everything by hand.

Cloths do not hang like paintings. Each one is stitched to a strip of cotton tape, which is fixed with hook and loop tape to a padded wooden batten, so the weight is spread along the whole top edge. Sewing the tapes took four conservators six days.

The order of the show was settled on paper months before, but it changed on the wall. Two cloths from the same compound, made forty years apart, looked so alike side by side that we moved them to face each other across the room instead.

Lighting took two nights. Every lamp was aimed, dimmed and checked with a meter at 50 lux, then checked again after the walls were painted because the pale blue changed the readings.

The labels were written in English and Yoruba and read aloud by two members of the team who grew up in dyeing families. Three were rewritten after they said, kindly, that we had got a word wrong.

At 6pm on opening night, the last batten went up. At 6.30pm the first guest asked if they could touch the cloth. The answer is no, but there is a handling table at the exit with new adire you can feel.