Thinking While Making— slowness, and making art in a frantic age

I've been working on a series of shells, going back to how I started with the Washed Ashore project. Sometimes I don't know why I do things — I'm just inspired to — and this was one such thing. I was making a piece called Tread Carefully, built up of numerous shells and stones. As I kept attaching more, it grew ungainly, so I began making pieces independently instead, thinking I'd connect them later — I'd even bought a canvas to stretch them onto, to  join them using Irish crochet — my style. But after two or three pieces, I realised working them independently was creating pieces in their own right.

So today I've picked up a rather large oyster shell — subtle shades of white and off-white, with little bits of pale yellow and grey. I'm using a metal crochet needle, three millimetres to start, though I've now moved to 0.7 millimetres. The thread isn't finely twisted, so it's not a stiff material to work with. I took the finer needle because the thicker one kept bumping against the shell and was difficult to negotiate. I began by crocheting five lines across the base, connecting th through natural holes in the shell. The intention is to work in layers emerging independently from these lines. The first line I started with double crochet, going straight rather than round, to keep this piece independent of the others.

The shell itself is about six inches by three, and it's a landscape in itself — undulating, full of hollows and holes I find useful for pulling my thread through. Multiple smaller shells are glued to it, and I'm fascinated by whatever glue lets shells adhere to each other this way. I love the oyster's texture — these tiny holes that aren't quite holes; I don't know if they're the radula of some other creature trying to get at the flesh inside.

I've gone back to the three-millimetre needle. After two rows of double crochet I'd moved further from the shell than I wanted, and the fine needle was catching on the plies, looking messy. It’s a steel hook with a fine point that had started chipping away bits of the calcium carbonate structure.  I like creative stitching, but I still want it neat. I'm not sure what comes next — I want the crochet to rise and clasp the shell, which means reducing stitches or holding steady. So I'm trying half crochet to tighten and shorten it, then maybe single crochet to help it hug the shell.

I work very intuitively with these pieces — it's hard to plan around a shell. I need holes to hook into, and I need to let the shell dictate the direction. I like this randomness, especially after a month-long, still-unfinished phase of disciplined cross-stitch. Maybe I'm restless and indisciplined, or maybe that's just how the mind works — only so much discipline before it needs release. It's also been a busy couple of weeks, preparing lectures for my mentoring Thursdays, which have been fascinating for me and my students — tracing how different genres of art evolved through social, environmental, and political conditions.

Making me think about the art we make today, in an age of short attention spans, saturated with images, where information is at our fingertips but there's no time to absorb the finer details of anything. That's part of why I write about my process — so that it isn't lost. How is a thing made? What does the making do to the maker?

I notice that textile art is increasingly becoming larger than life, grants and competition briefs also stress pushing boundaries of making, as though its acceptance into the art world requires it to leave behind the domestic, the craft, everything it was once associated with.

I'm not sure I agree, even though I understand the impulse. I appreciate that the machine-made has its place — we live in a post-machine, digital era. Community projects, farming work out to craftsmen — I see the value in this too. But for me, it's always been about being the craftsperson myself.

I first ran into this question when working as a designer, painting saris — literally running around five and a half meters of fabric so the paint wouldn't dry or drip more than I wanted. It was a different kind of skill than fine lines and delicate shading, but skill nonetheless. I once asked a client to raise the price for a sari, and he said, "But why? It can't have taken you more than half an hour." That was a moment of reckoning. I told him: maybe half an hour, but that half hour rests on almost three decades of drawing — since I was five or six — plus a whole studio helping lift the frame, tilt it, mix the dyes. Where does that money go? It doesn't just land in my pocket.

Around the same time, I was working on projects in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, Kashmir, and Andhra Pradesh, with weavers, rug makers, embroiderers, printers, and ikat weavers. I saw their conditions, and I saw the resentment toward designers who walked in and told them what to do — it was intimidating to play God. You had greater value if you could give them business. Since these were government sponsored projects, there were bureaucratic wrangles over who represented the work at Heimtextil, and some projects simply went unpaid. A lot of mismanagement.

The one thing I felt I could do was bring value to handcrafting by becoming a craftsperson myself — an artist bringing this work into the gallery. That was the initial impulse, which has led to much more.

I recognise that the artists working large are, in effect, drawing attention to textiles, and that different approaches are necessary. But that approach runs contrary to what I want my work to say. I want it to speak to the detail: why change the hook, why change the needle, how is the shell responding to my touch, how does it feel against my skin. The shell is uncomfortable to hold, and I hold the hook in an odd way — not the ladylike way that’s established tradition.

I've made another line at the back to pull the fabric in, and I'm struggling again with the three-millimetre green aluminium hook — prising each chain apart, literally jabbing the hook through — thumb and middle finger of my left hand steadying the thread, the hook itself held between thumb, middle, and index finger of my right. Getting the hook into a single crochet is proving difficult, my fingers rub  against the shell's rough, brittle, fragile-but-hard surface. One stitch through — the next equally hard, piercing against my middle finger before it pulls through. I'm skipping a few chains at the back where perfection doesn't matter, just enough to join it legitimately to the last row. Fewer stitches here has tightened the join so it won't show.

I'm now working behind the rows I've already done — three rows of double crochet, two more of double crochet, one of half double crochet — using the small gaps between them to add another line of half double crochet underneath, hoping it will tighten the crochet against the shell at the front. What I'd done before hadn't worked; the crochet had risen past the height of the shell itself.

I'm not really a crochet expert. I learned about ten years ago, when I first moved to Goa. Before that I only embroidered — running stitch, cross stitch, occasionally stem stitch. But Goa shifted my whole landscape, and I didn't know what to do until I started picking up stones and shells from the beach. Then the question became: what do I do with them?

A friend —Venetia, a Goan who owns a restaurant on Candolim-SinquerimBeach — kept handing me plastic bags of shells every time I visited. I'd protest that I'd collected enough; she'd say, "I know you. You'll pick up more." I tried embroidering with the shells first, but it looked strange and unfamiliar — I'd never worked with found objects this way. Crochet was her suggestion.

I taught myself off YouTube, and within a week could make a perfect chain. From there I just experimented — going around the shells, hearing about fractals from someone who'd tried something similar, and the research kept unfolding on its own.

I became curious about crochet's history in Goa — who brought it here, how it arrived. The best answer I've found is that it came through the Jesuits and the nuns who taught it to people here. Crochet's broader history is well documented, so I won't go into that, but for me, crochet has come to mean Goa specifically, and I'm still trying to trace exactly how — though maybe that's a small, futile pursuit given how little time there is and how many things pull at my attention. Not just that, these domestic crafts have never received much attention from academics and a lot of history is lost.

This piece has created something — not quite what I intended. So I have to reinvent what I was doing — another chain row underneath, to grasp the ridges of the shell below. With these pieces, it never goes the way I expect. It's almost as if the shell, needle, and thread are dictating their own story. It is my story, but it feels like they're helping me tell it.

The external world has always been my starting point. Partly through this piece, working these multiple, difficult lines, I asked myself: why make it so hard? And I laughed, thinking — maybe making this difficult gives me some companionship in the difficulty of life itself. Maybe overcoming it gives a sense of triumph, a way of creatively transcending difficulty to make something beautiful. Isn't that what art does?

Which brings me back to the idea of art in the age of Instagram, AI, and digital technology — I'd genuinely like to know what you think it should say. For me, quiet contemplation, with occasional writing, is a space to reflect, to make decisions, to organise my mind around everything I'm doing — including thinking through my lectures, my students, what more I can show them, how else I can help bring out their artist voice etc.

I'm not the kind of teacher who just says "carry on." I push my students — not everyone likes it, but I had teachers who pushed me, and I benefited enormously from what pinched the ego.  That's probably where it comes from, along with the fact that I push myself the same way.

So I'd genuinely like to know: what do you think about art in the digital age? I believe this could be an era where working with the hands gains more ground than ever. I have found that can't really relax without doing something with my hands — maybe it's habit, but I think there's a real neurological link between hand and brain. I remember reading that infants move their hands while suckling, and researchers have found a neurological  connection between mouth and hand that soothes the baby as it suckles.  I suspect there's a similar connection between hand and mind.

I feel that connection acutely doing this kind of crochet — concentrating hard to get the three-millimetre needle into tight single-crochet lines, trying to reach back to where I'd drifted from the shell. My face, contorts with every difficulty — not pretty faces, I’m sure though I have no mirror to confirm it.

I'd thought to work along the top line of the piece, but halfway through realised it had flattened things. So I'm trying the line between the back holes instead, to see if it does something different — working  a single chain.

I'm holding the hook the "ladylike" way now. My friend Venetia once watched me crochet at her restaurant and remarked at how awkwardly I was holding the needle — I told her it was just how I managed the difficult parts. But held between thumb and middle finger, the tension is better, the stitch cleaner. It takes me time to find my way back there.

Some people hold it in an almost fist — all four fingers and thumb wrapped around it — which is what I reach for when I need a surer grip, especially when the needle keeps slipping against the shell's calcium-carbonate surface.

This section hasn't produced anything spectacular, so I'm cutting the thread and moving to another portion, possibly with a colour change. I have a tencel yarn, not quite tightly twisted either, but with a nice sheen. The thread I've used here is a dirty ecru, close to the shell's own colour — the shell itself carries so many hues, it's almost magical. I've finished this end; the loops and edges can wait. Two knots done. Now, cream, beige, or grey for the next stretch — there's a blue-grey somewhere too, if I can find it.

When I think about social media now, I remember being fairly active on it once, enjoying the exchange. But about twenty months ago my mother passed away, at ninety-three, after a long illness. What followed shattered something between my siblings and me, and I went into deep mourning — not just for her, but for the fragmentation of our family, which hadn't started with her death at all, but had been building for years. I withdrew from social media entirely. A few people checked in when they hadn't seen me for a while. I found the distance such a relief that I never really returned, beyond the occasional blog post. I feel that engagement on social media is largely superficial — an economy of image rather than word.

That's part of what makes me think about what art can do instead: bring us back to something more authentic in ourselves. Do we need to scroll a thousand images a day, watch every reel, comment on every story? I don't think so. I think the quality of relationships and of life matters more, and that requires spending time with ourselves — asking who we actually are. I've been reading James Hollis, What Matters Most and An Examined Life, alongside each other — his idea that in the second half of life (where I clearly am now), our task shifts. In the first half, we're largely following what we've been told, taught, shown. At some point the question becomes: is any of this actually me? Does it relate to who I am? Why did my life bring me to this pass? Is this what I want, does it fulfil me?  And that means sitting with the decisions and choices that got you here — why, and what they became.

For me, the way to meet this furiously racing world is to step back and give it time. Embroidery and crochet let me do that — let me feel the needle scrape against shell, hear that faint screech, and connect it to something that lives in my own throat: a screech of non-belonging, of restlessness and insecurity.

Stepping back from a racing world isn’t easy. And when I do step back to think about art itself, I find myself wondering whether spectacle can sustain us indefinitely. I see a great deal of work being made collaboratively and communally now, and while I understand what that makes possible — many voices, participation, exchange — I sometimes find myself missing the intimacy of one person’s sustained engagement with material, and the particular quality that comes from skill developed over time.

I understand what conceptual art opened up for us — Duchamp fundamentally altered the question of where art resides, shifting attention away from the handmade object and towards the idea. That shift was necessary and enormously generative. But I find myself asking a different question now. If an artist conceives something and someone else executes it, what happens to the knowledge that comes through making? What happens to all those decisions that are made only because the material resists, surprises, refuses, or suggests another direction?

And perhaps AI makes that question even more interesting. If machines can increasingly generate images, texts, forms and possibilities for us, perhaps the value of working with our own hands changes rather than diminishes. Perhaps the awkwardness matters. The time matters. The resistance matters. The fact that I have to struggle to get a three-millimetre hook through a tight chain while holding an uncomfortable shell in my hand matters.

I don’t think this means that everyone must make everything themselves, or that one kind of art is more legitimate than another. But for me, the making is inseparable from the thinking. If I hand that part over entirely, I lose something I am actually trying to understand.

And perhaps that is what I keep returning to: in an age when so much can be done for us, what remains particular to the human hand, the human mind, and the encounter between them?

What do you think?

I Didn’t Know What I Was Doing, Until I Was Doing It

I had been working on the crab lace piece for months. I reached a point where I no longer knew whether it was finished, and when that happens, I put the piece away.

I turned to something else I’d been meaning to start — perhaps another piece for the co-creation series, which now has four. While looking for fabrics, I came across some digitally printed cotton panels of shell photographs I’d taken years ago — enlarged fragments in which the shells’ patterns become almost abstract.

I don’t know why they caught my eye, or what I meant to do with them. There was just an internal nudge, and I followed it.

What has always interested me about shells is that their pattern isn’t decoration applied to a finished surface. The shell is built incrementally, by the mollusc’s mantle, which secretes new material and pigment at the growing edge. Research suggests this growth is under neurosecretory control — neural activity shaping the secretory cells as each increment is laid down. The pattern accumulates over the animal’s life, recording a history in the shell itself, and it can keep changing as the animal grows or as conditions around it shift. Pigmentation is inherited, but its expression is shaped by environment.

This is what first made the shell compelling to me as an analogue for psychological patterning: something built over time through an interaction of what is inherited and what is lived, leaving a visible record. In a person, that record isn’t visible on the body. The shell gave me a way to imagine what it might look like if it were.

When I have fabric printed, I usually order two or three copies, so I can layer and play with them. I began by placing two identical prints together over two layers of cotton markeen, the fabric usually used for lining furnishings. I stitched through all four layers with running stitch, pulling the thread so the surface puckered and became tactile, following the ridges of the shell to deepen their indentation.

When I stopped to look at what I’d done, I thought: what am I doing? What is the stitch adding to what the shell is already saying? It didn’t sit right. The pattern felt too bold, too blunt, too exposed.

This became one of those pieces where I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t illustrating an idea — I was working intuitively, letting something pull me along and following it anyway.

I took a piece of silk organza — not plain, but woven with self-checks, which let me pull out warp and weft threads. I began disturbing the fabric, pulling threads loose, tearing it, and laid it over the shell. I liked the effect, but now the organza was eclipsing the shell entirely. Again: what am I doing? I went with it anyway.

I cut away parts of the organza so some areas of the shell were fully exposed and others stayed veiled. Then I took thicker threads — crochet cotton, wool, whatever I had in the right gauge, in colours drawn from the shell — and couched them along the ridges still visible.

This was layered over the running stitch I had already spent a day doing. For a while I wondered whether that work had simply disappeared beneath the organza. But the quilted texture underneath remained perceptible. Something I could no longer fully see was still affecting the surface, giving it a depth no flat print could have.

I began working over the exposed areas with a crazy cross-stitch — straight stitches placed in an ad hoc way, the thread used almost like paint, building colour in layers. A black area, looked at closely, is never simply black: there’s maroon in it, violet, dark brown, rust, a daub of grey. It took me back to my college days in Delhi, learning watercolour, learning to see the many hues folded into a single colour — a blue inside a green, a pink inside a green. That way of seeing has stayed with me.

But working the cross-stitch over what was already exposed felt redundant — why stitch what I could already see?

So I moved to the areas where the shell was only partly visible through the organza, drawing out fragments of colour and pattern I could barely make out beneath it. I wasn’t reproducing the shell. I was choosing: intensifying some areas, leaving others alone, letting the stitches start large and taper down to something close to seed stitch.

I photographed the piece as it changed. At one point I looked at it and thought: this is like a frame grab from a video. I had somehow grabbed a state of mind.

I had begun with the shell’s pattern already in mind as an analogue for our own psychological patterning — the inherited and learned responses that shape how we react to others, mostly invisible to us until we look. But something else was happening now. The pattern was still there, but no longer whole. A veil had fallen over it, and the veil itself had been torn — some parts of what lay beneath fully visible, some partly, some almost entirely hidden.

I began to see the piece differently: less an illustration of psychological pattern, more a rendering of what it feels like to look at oneself.

The usual explanation — that we repeat our early family dynamics in later relationships — never fully convinced me. It felt too tidy, a category. Life and living are more complex than that —— with many more shades of grey than that suggested framework allows for.

What emerged instead, through the stitching rather than through thinking it out in advance, was something more specific: less about who I was drawn to, more about how I behaved once a relationship had taken hold — the adapting, the allowances, the doubting of my own read on things. That recognition arrived through the making, not before it.

This matters to me because of what it says about how I work. I don’t always begin with an idea and give it form. Sometimes the making does the thinking — shifting the question, showing me a distinction I hadn’t had words for, or revealing that the pattern I’d been taught to look for wasn’t the one actually operating.

We excavate our patterns through experience, often through pain, and come to recognise certain tendencies and where they might have come from. But that awareness doesn’t hand us a complete picture. The veils don’t lift and vanish — they stay, shattered, along with the sense of self we carried before we saw them at all. There is a loss in that seeing too: perhaps of innocence, perhaps that sense of self we were accustomed to. A knowing that was challenged.

Some things become clear. Some we only glimpse. Some we choose to look at directly; others we leave alone.

What I’d made, perhaps, was an image of that: the pattern underneath, the shattered and provisional self, what pain and experience bring into view, and what stays concealed — all present at once, none of it resolved — if it ever can be!

Understanding a pattern doesn’t free you from it. Awareness doesn’t guarantee you’ll recognise it in the moment, or choose differently the next time. We live with what we’ve discovered about ourselves, and with what stays hidden, and with the shattered veils through which we see both.

The piece is still evolving. So, probably, is my understanding of it.

Because I’d started thinking of it as a frame grab, a captured moment, it seemed to need an edge — something to hold it. I began a cross-stitch border on 14 count Aida matte that I’d attached to the original fabric. I haven’t decided how it will end up — even on all four sides or not. But as I worked it, the idea of a border opened out further than simply extending the colours of the shell into the border area.

Borders have been part of my visual vocabulary for years, particularly through designing sarees, where a border is never an afterthought — it has a fundamental relationship with the field it contains.

 I’ve also been drawn to the hashiya in Mughal painting, the margin surrounding the central image, which could carry its own imagery, ornament, calligraphy, or poetry. It didn’t just frame the painting. It ran alongside it, sometimes echoing the centre, or opening a separate layer of meaning entirely — a parallel dialogue. This in particular appealed to me for this piece.

I thought that if the central field holds the visible and obscured pattern, the torn veil, the excavation and the partial seeing, then perhaps the border could carry something else.

I began thinking about words.  They may not describe the image directly, but would  belong  to the same psychological terrain. Repeated around the edge, I visualised them as a pattern with their own meanings. I envisaged them almost disguised and hidden within colours — the pigmentation of the shell fragment that I was extending into the border. 

A border that would no longer simply contain the work. It would carry a parallel dialogue with what the work had revealed to me.

 

 

Mind Replays While Tacking

It's almost four in the afternoon. It's been a strange kind of day. Rain, no rain.

As I awoke to the day, looking out of the window, I noticed how serene it looked. So innocent—as if the cloud and the fronds of the palm leaf were cradled in a baby blue crib.

Then, as the day progressed I had to dress my wound. I'd burnt my hand three days ago while cooking. I wasn't exactly careless, but I didn't pay enough attention to the fact that the lip of the new saucepan is a little tricky— doesn't pour neatly—spills and splashes—most annoying.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I pouring hot soup into the mixie, I burnt the top of  my left hand. A very, very severe burn. After seeing the skin wither and peel off with pus beginning to rise,  I had to go to  a nearby primary healthcare center. They gave  me an injection for the pain, some antibiotics and painkillers. I was yelping in pain. It was really bad—terrible!

I couldn’t stitch for a few days because any movement of the left hand, disturbed the dressing, which in turn aggravated the wound.

It was uncomfortable and I couldn’t help but think how people can inflict this on anybody else, but more than that, how do people self-immolate? I remembered the protests against the Mandal Commission and those students in Delhi setting themselves on fire. I didn’t witness it myself, but newspaper images of young men flailing—their bodies aflame—aren’t easy to forget. I don’t know why my mind went there, but it did. We read about bride burning and such things and it’s awful, but burning my own hand this way made these images come alive as never before.

I'm now working on this piece—tentatively called Crab Lace. I've been doing it for a long time and it's taking forever because a lot of tacking work has to be done between the five layers of fabric before I can begin any embroidery. Tacking isn’t something that makes me think too much about what I’m doing. My mind starts replaying all that I have read/heard etc. 

There’s the war in Iran—neither war nor peace, a supposed ceasefire that's not. Glancing at the NYT headlines, disturbed the serenity of the day and what I’d been observing about the weather. Making me think that,  I have the luxury of these gentle moments, even the observations I make about my stitching. Those in war strife zones are striving for basic survival. It seems unfair.

The stitching piece  is inspired by the way the crabs feed off the debris on the beach and in effect clean it for us. Perhaps that’s something we could do for ourselves. Chew on those moments of grief, of pain, of discomfort—digest them.

Now, I have  a knot.  Most uncomfortable. I'm inserting the tip of my needle into the core of the knot, but it is so tight I can't get needle-point into it. If I could, I'd be able to wrestle with it and open it out. It's so tight and so small, I probably need a magnifying glass.

Recently I got news that two of my friends have been diagnosed with cancer. It’s troubling me. My father had cancer and I know what it did to him—to all of us. I know it was decades ago and medicine has made significant advances—but those memories don’t just go away.

I'm holding the thread in my left hand—the burnt hand—it still stings a bit. Between thumb. and index finger, assisted by the second finger, I’ve pulled it taut so that I can try and find the space to inset the needle point to loosen the knot. I'm doing a lot of guesswork because I can’t really see the gap in the threads that have knotted. I have a really fine needle, but maybe I can get a finer one.

Okay, so I've got the finer needle into it. The knot is moving. Now the question is whether I can open it all the way through—unravel the threads to resume stitching.

And I have.
It is so satisfying when you can open a knot.

To me, this  likens  to the wound sitting inside us— things that are knotting in our stomach—the acidity and tension. If you can just release it, it is does indeed lend a sense of satisfaction, doesn’t it?

I like the parallel of the crab digesting its food with us digesting our emotions and cleaning up the environment so that subconscious actions don’t create a stench. Rolling bits of sand in its mouth—then rolling it out into minute balls of sand —moving out of its burrow radially and depositing the feeding residue like sand-lace. It’s a  beautiful image that allows me to think there can be, that there is beauty in dealing with our feelings and emotions. The healer in me wants to believe that we can lessen our body suffering if we pay more attention to what's going on in the mind.

Perhaps I've cultivated that kind of sensitivity. Perhaps that's the kind of person I am. It’s certainly the direction my life has taken. It’s arduous, it tedious—much like the labour of the minuscule sand bubbler crab—especially given its size—its  persistence and ardour are memorable. 

I see a lot—both a blessing and a curse. Noticing minute details of life around me. Getting easily stimulated. I can be sitting in my room just drinking water and I will notice the sky. Noting changes in the colour, clouds,  how the shadow travels among the leaves and how delectable that vision is—between filling glasses, between sips. 

And then the mind goes to those who live in war-strife zone. These countries, people living in that region  don't have that luxury. But doesn't that make my capacity  all the more pertinent?

Art is made in all sorts of spaces—in many ways that range from being guttural and spontaneous—responsive in a direct way to subtler visuals. The kind of art that I make is slow and can get quite tedious. The immediacy of expression isn’t possible. Even though the impetus to start something is. But Crab lace—the piece I’m presently working on—it’s more about what the crabs do that inspires me than something I’m feeling aggrieved about.

I’ve been  stitching the layers for months. I’m trying to re-create my own version of the patterns I find on the beach. Evoking the kind of residue that emerges once I’ve been through the emotional vortex—what remains. Sometimes I don't want to come and stitch. It's so tedious. It's not giving me a moment of discovery. It's not challenging me technically. It's not challenging me emotionally. It’s just about tacking and more tacking.

And then I talk myself through it, as I am doing now. I've got the audio on my phone on.  And I'm just talking through the stitching so that the moment is as real as it is.

I am processing like the crabs do.

The zigzag stitches from underneath, which I'm not trying to cover, are a subtle expression of the way the mind does work. So many thoughts, so much that comes up when there is a little space from insta, news, fb and the rest of it. 

I've come to the end of my thread, so I'm cutting the tail after I’ve done  two or three repeated stitches in the same place, and then through those two or three threads, I take the needle and and thread out—hopefully it will not come undone. And quite frankly, the kind of piece I am stitching, if it does come undone, it might very well be more evocative than perfect stitching.

I think of my mother who suffered such a great deal with severe osteoarthritis and Parkinson's. For the last two years of her life, she was fed by a tube. She’d beg us for taste of aam papad, coke, chocolate or tea and mangoes. A lick was all she was allowed. I often wonder if she’d paid greater attention to her emotional wounds that her body wouldn’t have had to take on so much suffering. There’s no scientific proof for this, but I think about it all the time. 

I wake each morning wanting to know what I'm feeling. I journal to understand that feeling. Sometimes I have weird dreams and then I write them out, wondering what my subconscious mind is telling me.  Then I’m distracted by a dark-skinned man climbing up my neighbours coconut tree and I lose the thread. Mind screams overload. Is it because I’ve sensitised myself to the subtler dimensions of being, or is this the way it is with all of us—perhaps not consciously?

The world gets uncomfortable with pain. It wants people to move on. But grief doesn't work like that.

As I sip some elaichi chai, the mug I'm drinking from was painted by my school friend Punchie. She paints these mugs with Hopi style, North American—Indian inspired black-and-white designs. As I savour my tea, I think of her:
She recently lost her mother.

Even though I lost my own mother ten months ago, and we didn't have a particularly close relationship, all kinds of wounds continue to surface. Grieving is something you cannot put a timeline on.

Sometimes the thinking and feelings that come up while stitching gets  so intense that I have to get up after half an hour, or even after ten minutes of stitching. I just need a break from it. From the emotional vortex, from focus on both this and the stitching at hand.

I may put on some TV, but honestly that doesn’t really stop the undertow of thoughts—just helps me keep going. And then later at night, I lie awake with what’s bothering me . 

The Intimacy of Stitch

After returning from travel and two weeks of intense outward engagement, I realised that my resistance to stitching was not simply fatigue or distraction. It was something else.

After days of immersion in other forms of attention: travel, conversations, paperwork, pending tasks, research into Kasuti, observing other methods of making, meeting artisans, studying structure and technique. Engaging with architecture, food, soil and stone — tabulating possible references for the beginnings of Kasuti. Although I remained intellectually engaged with needlework, I was not stitching with my own hands. And when I returned home, it took me another two weeks before I could fully approach the large textile piece waiting for me.

The work itself is ambitious, approximately 1.5 by 1.5 metres, layers of cotton crochet contained and layered between layers of unbleached silk organza. I have written about this evolving “crab lace” process, where crochet fragments and residue become part of a larger stitched surface.

http://gopikanathstitchjournal.blogspot.com/2026/03/crab-lace.html

At this stage I was tacking together five uneven layers of cloth, freehand, without a frame, because the crochet protrusions and shifting surfaces made stretching impossible on a hoop and my ‘adda’ isn’t large enough to accommodate this scale. The work had to be turned repeatedly on the work table — guided by the hand, its proximity to areas that needed to be stitched — maintaining tension and more.

I had chosen a pale grey thread deliberately. Against the black crocheted threads it remained visible, but against the grey and off-white lace it almost disappeared. The stitches moved between visibility and disappearance, holding the structure together — a sense of ease, familiarity and rapport I hadn’t noted before.

As I returned to the act of stitching itself, I became aware of something I may well have felt for years but had never seen nor articulated so clearly: there is an extraordinary intimacy to stitch.

I began my design life as a weaver, and I loved weaving. I still remember the wonder of watching individual strands of thread slowly become cloth. The processes of winding, warping, threading the heddles and reed, passing the shuttle back and forth, all carried their own rhythm and intelligence. But weaving, I now realise, also maintains a certain distance between the body and the cloth. The loom dictates posture, width, tension, movement. Even when one is deeply involved in preparing and constructing the weave, the fabric itself remains stretched within an external structure. The body adjusts itself to the loom — almost always separated from the emerging fabric, by the reed and the frame of the loom.

Stitch and crochet — even knitting, feel fundamentally different.

Here, the cloth engages directly with both hands and the body. It gathers, folds, bunches, softens, and resists according to the movement of  one’s limbs and torso. How I sit is relevant to how I stitch. The work is turned instinctively, held against the lap, cradled and shifted constantly — in search of comfort and control. The material adjusts to you as much as you adjust to it.

While tacking these five layers together, I could feel the organza rubbing against my fingers. Its starchy silkiness — a familiar discourse. I was ruching the fabric to grip it more securely, while managing the uneven tension created by the crochet and layered cloth beneath, as I stitched. At times,  just placing my hand gently under all the transparent layers—palm facing upwards—giving the needle support to pierce. Sometimes no hand under, just the cloth placed on the table—both hands above, helping the needle, pulling it out.  Hands smoothing over the fabric after a few stitches—sometimes holding tension, otherwise gently avoiding bulges. The crochet itself was malleable, constantly shifting shape—I pulled it where I wanted to see more space. It pulled back where there wasn’t enough thread for elasticity.  Every few moments I had to stop, lift the entire piece, rotate it, settle it back onto the table, readjust my body, leaning forward, bringing the fabric closer, ruching and tacking.

The needle held between my thumb and index finger —moved in and out of them. Carving little dents into each. The thread tunnelled through its eye, passing these two fingers. The work was not distant, it was an extension of me — continuously touching, caressing, nudging, coaxing me into a dialogue.

To stitch is to enter a relationship with the fabric, the needle, the thread. The attention it demands takes me inwards. Almost subterranean. One cannot remain outwardly focused while stitching. It brings up thoughts and feelings in an unexpected way. Urging me to sit with them. Creating a rhythm that enables this. It becomes difficult to avoid yourself.

In that sense, stitch resembles an inner conversation. Not performative thought, not social speech, but something quieter and more direct, even if it’s without words. Something changes, shifts — the mood alters.

While working, I found myself relating to my inner life with the same closeness with which I was relating to the fabric: like a journal I write by hand — sensing resistance, recognising fragility, allowing slack where necessary. Stopping when it gets too intense. Pulling gently where continuum was needed, tackling resistance to a deeper excavation of being. I know it’s where my sanity lies. I know it’s how I deal with stress, but sometimes it’s like starting a relationship all over again.

Perhaps this is why returning to stitch after periods of outward immersion can feel difficult. It asks for a different state of being. It asks me to slow down, to be comfortable with repetition, to touch and pay attention to what I am doing, in a very precise and meditative way—to be comfortable in my skin: an intimacy that seems almost alien when outward in the world.

And yet, once inside that space again, there is also familiarity. A recognition. A return to a state of flow. The body remembers the relationship before the mind fully does.