Always coming home
Trilogy of carrying fragments of intangibles in the body in a foreign place; hunger, memories and embodied rituals as textiles sculptures. 2024
The idea of home is fluid as it is both a physical space left behind in one’s home country and the safe space I am trying to create within and around me in these new foreign surroundings. Coming from post-colonial Mumbai, India to post-colonial London UK I am also burdened with intergenerational trauma in layered ways sometimes very subtle and hard to point to overtly. As a neuro divergent woman of colour, I am trying to contextualize my practice in this loaded context of being situated in two places at one.
I keep the Indigo dye pot alive. Feed it lime, sour tamrind pulp, henna paste and sometimes a shot of gin. The fist time I manages to dye a cotton scrap blue I danced in Joy. Since then I tried to dye everything - jute, silk, yarn cotton, old clothes, rice paper, hair, skin. It is facinating how fresh green leaves are fermented to extract this insoluble fast blue dye. the word of blue is Indigo. neel, asmani,
Once I tried dyeing my hair in soaked indigo and forgot to wear gloves. My brown finger tips soaked all the pigment in. they were dirty murky teal blackness. my finger failed the finger print scanner, sorry please try again . in this blackness i see the dark history of this dye - the violence, colonial exploitation, art in protest and then the revolution.
Blue from indigo is not singular, it is different everyday. Today my pot leaves a soft azure. my studio kitchen looks like a blue labroatory. I make my own space - safe, quiet, nourishing, alive. this is how I feel free. trying failing and exprementing. In my own space - in my own time. This site of kitchen is a site of domestice violence, where young brides are burnt alive for dowry, women face physical and mental abuse, rape and exploitation.
