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Process

I fell into using embroidery in my current works on paper after I moved to London. I didn't deliberately decide on it. My choice of materials and projects naturally led me to embroidering. I had started using khadi hundred percent cotton rag and it behaved so much like fabric that I felt I had to take a needle to it. Eventually, I started embroidering heavyweight cellulose paper. At some point, the pricking of this paper and the stiffness of it against the slippery thread had started to feel natural and reassuring. The process was a link with home, because I was using the simple stitches that I'd grown up with when darning and dressmaking.   

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But there has also been another, more fraught aspect in my choice that I've struggled with: a deep-seated, possibly gendered bias againt ornamental needlework. Growing up in India, I experienced rich embroidery through everyday fashion and folk art: through the pearly and diaphanous shadows and highlights of Lucknawi Chikankari work in traditional cotton kurtas made summers bearable; mirrorwork tapestries from Kutch hung in our living room; on special occasions we wore rich golden zardosi and vibrant ari work on fancy nagra jutis; and I have fond memories of the soft, crinkly kantha quilts my mother commissioned to be made with her worn old cotton saris. The family inherited ornamental work by my great-grandmother, of lush peacocks and floral branches. 

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But no woman I knew embroidered for a living. That was the work done by men. There was a sense of needlework as an aspect of domestication, that I had internalized. My mother had an English book of embroidery when I was growing up, with pictures of idyllic cottages, teddies and floral alphabets. As a young girl I loved looking through the pages. But as a grownup the thought of those pages makes me uneasy, even repulsed. It is this knee-jerk reaction that I've wanted to combat since I started my mixed-media work a few years ago. 

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I've been hand-sewing for decades now, since I first learned the meditative pleasure of the running stitch. Thus far, I have always hand-sewn for functional rather than ornamental reasons. At twelve, I made my first pleated skirt, at the convent school I went to. 

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