"Tent: A Space for the Ceremony of Close Readings" and "Mobile Palace" are artworks that are a propositions. My drawing practice includes making paper from khadi or cotton cloth, a cloth with a materiality of embedded political resistance. In tracing a through-line relationship of khadi to Ahmedabad, Gujarat  – (once known as the Manchester of India and home to Gandhi’s Ashram), I was drawn to the iconic Mill Owners’ Association Building by architect Le Corbusier and site architect Balkrishna Doshi, built in the mid-1950s.​I render Le Corbusier’s concrete structures in India into a piece of soft architecture with a decorative, endlessly repeating pattern. The graphic nature of the façade, motifs from the teak-panelled auditorium, and features from the roof of the original building are translated into block print designs. As the building has no “hand” present, the hand is re-introduced through the lamp, the carved wood blocks by Mukesh P. Prajapati in Petaphur, and with the process of block-printing and dyeing by artisan-designer Salemamad D. Khatri of Ajrakhpur, Kutch, Gujarat. The artisans are connected in tracing their craft to a long ancestral lineage of block-printing, which  involves a labour intensive process of scouring, mordanting, printing, lime resist printing, and dyeing the cloth multiple times in order to achieve a multi-layered repeat pattern. The initial work, "Tent: A Space for the Ceremony of Close Readings" is a structure inspired by spaces of celebration like a shamiana, military tents from the Ottoman Empire which were heavily ornamental and evoked power through their presence, and by the auditorium itself with its sweeping ceilings like the interior of a tent.What can occur when skills gained from crafts, usage of ornamentation, and ideals of modernism are fused together in surface and structure? How does one collaborate with generations of artisanal knowledge in India and ideas of existing design that engage the hand, but take notions of “design” and “craft” into new directions?

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"Mobile Palace" creates a space for gathering and evokes a shelter without any of the cloth being forced into a structure or form. I wanted each panel to appear as though they had been lifted off the table of the block printer and simply hung in the sky. Each panel is treated with appliqué or beading, and each is unique in the print and dye combination.