2022- Present
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
To learn more about Brass Tacks as a clothing label, see the archive.
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.
