I am a visual artist with a primary focus in textiles and portrait art. I’m interested in exploring the tapestry of ancestral crafts, community, and nature. My work invites viewers to investigate the interconnectedness of each of these realms and how they bring us all together. My practice is deeply rooted in deepening my relationship with the communities behind each of the ancestral crafts I add to my repertoire. I do this by conducting field research in visiting villages and artisan workshops, where I sit alongside craftspeople, listening to their stories and watching their hands at work. These encounters allow me to absorb the rhythms, techniques, and cultural contexts that give regional crafts their life. I blend these traditional South Asian textile techniques and motifs with contemporary outputs and designs. Using the ancestral craft traditions of Bandhani (tie & dye resist work), Mirror work embroidery (Gujarat), and Phulkari embroidery (Punjab), etc. as my paint brush to create works of art that explore my own identity and personal expression. I also harvest and process foraged plants into natural dyes, experimenting with their shifting colors to create textiles rooted in place and time. Leaning on these familial ancestral techniques as a vehicle for design, whilst deriving natural colors from the land, and incorporating queer cultural influences has allowed me to develop an artistic practice that holistically embodies who I am– my queer South Asian American identity. My work uses textiles to explore the continuous connective thread of the human experience, tracing how migration, displacement, and the global trade of cloth have linked seemingly separate cultures. Rooted in my family’s history as refugees, my practice also examines how fiber carries stories of movement, resilience, and memory across time and geography.
