On Place

Stick Season

Sumi ink on found cotton sari, 2024

While in India, taking down clean laundry from the clothesline was an everyday thing….Crisp and stiff from the baking sun, the saris, petticoats, and blouses were quickly snatched away from clothes pins and draped over the shoulder, eager to get into the shade before feet get scorched on the hot terrace floor. I still remember the harsh light filtering and softening brilliant colors and the smell of sun on cotton. Wearing these clothes was like wearing the atmosphere itself- the sun, the air, and the smell of trees, smog, or dust that surrounded the clothesline.
After many years, I felt like “wearing” a place again while at Vermont Studio Center in fall 2024. During my 3 weeks there, I photographed trees that caught my eye and drew one periodically on a white sari. Once done, I felt a strong impulse to wear it. Photographs by Sarah Schacht, a fellow resident at Vermont studio Center. In Vermont, winter is called “Stick Season”.
Wearing Stick Season
They said to be open to possibilities
And I listened.
I walked among tall trees,
wandered across streams and upon hills
I hopped over boulders, holding my heart in my hands
In my ears, the crunch of dry leaves and tinkling of water
In my nostrils, the smell of earth and bark
to breathe
Is to be one with the world.
To draw
is to embed and wear
the residue of place.

Fault Lines

North Korea / South Korea, India / Pakistan, Syria / Turkey, Gaza Strip, Mexico / USA

2019, 5 fabric panels suspended in a row from ceiling overhead, Embroidery on silk organza, 21” X 48” each

This work was made in response to a vintage door hanging from North West Gujarat in the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection at UW-Madison.

Doorways and borders are portals to the outside and inside. Door hangings have been used to welcome good spirits and guests into the home for centuries and are deeply tied to Indian aesthetic and spiritual culture. Borders on the other hand define a country, acting as gatekeepers for a secure and safe nation. But they are also portals to other places, to safety, prosperity and security. However, they are often the most treacherous and contentious passageways and remain examples of a divided and fragmented globe. In this work, I use the interstitial form of a door hanging to speak about the most dangerous borders in the world at the current moment– the Gaza Strip, Syria and Turkey, US and Mexico, India and Pakistan, North Korea and South Korea. I imagine what it would be like if these borders became welcome ports and the line between insider and outsider is blurred. In this work, I bring in my long-term interest in ritual, the body’s relationship to space, and viewer engagement. The extensive history of narrative embroidery techniques became an inspiration to create these “door hangings”. By walking under this row of door hangings, the viewers symbolically cross the most dangerous land borders in the world. I urge viewers to think about the earth as a global village and borders as portals for human and material exchanges rather than fault lines where lives are lost.

Thread in Open Waters    (5 minutes)

Video Assistance: Maeve Jackson, 2019

Water and Memory have similar properties- both malleable, transient, ephemeral and transformative. In this work, I use personal video recordings of waters that have moved me during my travels over the past decade and of Lake Michigan. I release these memories from the specificities of time and place and give importance to the experience of moments. Fleeting instances are activated and brought to the present through the performance of sewing, in a futile effort to pin these moments down. I evoke a sense of the haptic and encourage a suspension of belief, asking the viewer to share in an alternative journey through my memories. The work also speaks to our brief time on earth and the hope that we leave the world as we found it- untouched by our presence. The loop in the video enhances a sense of ritual and the cyclical nature of water and time.

Blurred Boundaries

2019, Site specific installation of screen printed and hand cut hanji (Korean paper) and maps

This installation utilizes screen-printed and hand-cut maps and Hanji paper to create layers upon layers of complexity. Playing with the polarities of micro and macro, I use screen-printed patterns sourced from electron microscope scans of Hanji paper which then inform my cutting. Hanji helps make the maps pliable, yet strong giving the work a sense of movement and fluidity. The piece seeks to disturb and displace the very intent of a “map” to locate and identify. In this era of global movement, this work is an act of disregarding boundaries that divide us and asks the viewer to contemplate matter and also what constitutes our interconnected world.

Negotiate

Drawing animation and video performance projected on plexiglass and sand, 2012

Negotiate engages an ancient diagram (Shri Yantra). It functions as “form”, rooted in its history and culture, somewhat frozen in time. Many centuries ago, it was designed as a problem solving tool- the problem being, aiding the mind to focus on meditation. By activating this diagram through animation and performance, I release it from its specificity and “intensify” an inherent potential- one of “virtuality”. The evolution of the work is two fold. The animation dissects the form into infinite moments in time gradually building up and producing the gestalt of a diagram, at a certain point of completion, eventually becoming “still” and standing out as a “figure”. But my interventional performance of making changes to this figure activates it again, dissecting and morphing what is already there. Coupled with the looping installation, it becomes a never-ending repetition of transformation - of becoming figure and then disintegrating into the virtual and becoming figure again. The animation makes the cracks between each mark visible, bringing awareness to the perceptual “bridging “ that enables the marks to be perceived as line and the mind to “oversee” as diagram. The fragmentation and partiality of my experience as a transplanted individual with multiple identities is expressed through incorporating many layers, methods and materials. The erased diagram never fully disappears much like the embodied cultural memory of childhood that leaves indelible traces despite the passage of time.

Measuring Space

2014, screen prints on paper, tape measures.

The span of a hand is an ancient unit of measurement in India. Often times, this unit defines the proportion of the body in sculpture and the body’s relationship to space in architectural design. In Measuring Space, I appropriate this image of measurement and use it like a tape measure. The work calls attention to the connection between body and space and how we are constantly trying to gauge a new space and how we relate to it.