2022- Present
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I make textiles, work with artisans to develop them, and create limited edition collections. My close engagement with artisans has led to another interest: understanding the tension between design, identity, tradition, livelihood, class and cultural capital.
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My work is currently centred around textile weaving – I weave on my own as well as with a few artisans – in an effort to approach design through the craft process. This began as an attempt to challenge the notion that design and technical processes can be regarded as separate functions; the process and the materials guide me in an organic yet systematic way, to arrive at iterations that could not have been achieved by reverse engineering an idea.
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Weaving is a skill, but it is also research and design; a quest to answer simple “what if” questions. In order to test the research, and to complete the cycle of a practitioner, it’s important to me that I make the work publicly available before the next round of R&D. This commercial aspect also allows me to nurture my relationship with my co-collaborators, the artisans. To this endeavour, I create limited-edition collections of apparel with the textiles I design.
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Outside of my time weaving and with weavers, I think and write about the tension I observe between craft and hand-made. Reading the experiences and writings of others in the field sets the context for my thinking, but it my first-hand experiences that are invaluable to forming my opinions.
For example, I wrote a chapter in the upcoming Routledge Handbook on Craft and Sustainability.
2007 – 2019
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In 2007, I founded a clothing label, Brass Tacks. Borne out of a personal need for well-tailored clothes from handloom fabric, Brass Tacks produced structured, contemporary silhouettes from quality hand-crafted textiles. The Indian market in the early and mid 2000s offered bridal wear at one end, and work wear with no element of craft at the other. I realized there was a large void in the Indian market at the time, leaving young, urban Indian women with few options to express their identity creatively through clothes. To speak to this identity, I wanted to capture a spirit of the time; of women who wished to be seen as progressive and modern while figuring out which aspects of Indian heritage and tradition they wished to embrace.
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To learn more about Brass Tacks as a clothing label, see the archive.
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Today, Brass Tacks is the name through which I retail limited edition collections that are a result of my research and design with artisans and the hand-crafted textiles they produce.
