Crab Lace

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way.”

                                                                   —John Ruskin

 

 

When the tide recedes along the beaches of Goa, particularly at Morjim and Ashwem, sand bubbler crabs emerge from their burrows beneath the sand. During high tide they remain hidden deep within these burrows. As the water withdraws, they come out to feed.

Working slowly outward from the mouth of the burrow, each crab takes tiny mouthfuls of sand, extracting organic debris and decaying matter. The cleaned sand is rolled into small pellets and deposited beside them. As they continue this quiet labour, the beach gradually fills with delicate radial fields of pellets — intricate, lace-like traces that mark where the sand has been sifted and cleaned.

These patterns are not decorative. They are the residue of feeding — the visible outcome of a process that clears the beach of organic decay.

What interests me in these formations is not simply their beauty but the logic of their making: emerging from a centre, repeated movements across a surface, and the gradual transformation of feeding residue into patterns that are lace-like—delicate, decorative yet with a physiological purpose that serves the ecosystem.

This embroidered work, that I have recently resumed, began nearly seven years ago with the observation and study of the sand bubbler crab’s behavioural tendencies.

At the time I was learning crochet and was far from adept at it. I began experimenting with the medium because it allowed me to create small bobbled forms that reminded me of the pellet-like residues left by the crabs. I did not initially consider translating these patterns into stitch. Crochet felt like the right technique for the idea.

I started by crocheting thick strands that radiate outward from a burrow-like centre. Along these strands I created pellet-like forms, loosely echoing the residue left by crabs. Each radial element was made individually over time.

Two of these strands were then stretched and lightly stitched onto a canvas mounted on an adda. The adda provides the tension and stability necessary for the work to remain open while I build a net-like structure between the strands. Without anchoring the crocheted elements to this temporary ground, it would not be possible to add further threads or develop the network of connections. Off the frame, the crocheted forms collapse into an amorphous bunch of thread.

Working on the adda also requires my body to move constantly around the frame. As the crochet structure grows, it becomes awkward to reach certain areas from one side, and I shift positions, moving around the frame or sitting on the opposite side to work. Because my studio space is limited, getting in and out of the frame itself becomes part of the process — the body slipping into the structure and then out again, without toppling the frame, in order to reach the next point of connection. I am not formally trained in Irish crochet, and many of the joins emerge through this improvised negotiation between hand, thread, and the physical position of the body around the frame. My discomfort of sitting on the floor, also determines the end result. Partly because it requires me to stop frequently, get up and stretch my legs, which in turn allows me a different perspective.

Once the strands are secured in place, I begin working into the spaces between them.

Using finer crochet threads in muted greys and beiges, I join sections across the gaps. In doing so, I draw on the logic of Irish crochet, where individual motifs are connected through a network of stitches that gradually forms a lace-like field between them.

The materials themselves play an important role in this process. I work with threads of different gauges and fibres — cotton, rayon, and Tencel — each requiring a different crochet hook and producing its own tension and texture. Some threads hold the structure, others create softness or sheen. These variations allow the lace to develop a tactile surface that goes beyond simply emulating the crab patterns.

Sometimes the connections remain light and open, formed by long chains bridging two strands. At other times the space becomes denser and begins to layer. In some areas the lace sits flat against the surface; in others it rises slightly, creating a second layer over the first. The structure gradually becomes a network of overlapping threads and textures. I didn’t like the overlapping layers, so undid them.

These decisions emerge slowly in response to the structure already present. Some areas need openness; others require closer gathering of threads. The hand moves between the strands, joining, adjusting, and undoing, allowing the work to evolve through the negotiation of its internal spaces.

The process is slow and uncertain. Each connection raises questions: how much to join, where the structure should remain open, and how the tension of one section will affect the rest. Because the piece only holds its form while stretched on the frame, every adjustment must be made with awareness of the flexibility of the eventual form. What I see on the frame, may not be what reforms in another space. Quite like site-specific installations.

The eventual shape and structure of the work is still unresolved. I am considering whether it will remain a loose structure, suspended so that its openness remains visible, or whether it might be mounted onto a translucent ground such as organza or net to stabilise it. Its scale also remains fluid. New elements can still be added, but the frame itself sets limits, requiring the work to be repeatedly removed, adjusted, and returned to the surface. And as the crochet progresses, I’m realising that It will not hold in too large a piece as I had initially intended. So, I’ve decided not to add any more radial strands.

I am not attempting to reproduce the crab's patterns. What interests me is the logic of their labour — the transformation of residue through patient, incremental action.

This idea of residue has appeared in my work before. In the Chai series, I looked closely at the stains left behind in a teacup — marks that became a metaphor for the residues carried in the mind. Those works emerged from reflecting on shame: the subtle and overt ways in which individuals are judged, corrected, or diminished by the expectations of family, society, and culture. Shame leaves traces that are not easily erased. Like stains in a cup, these experiences remain embedded within memory and emotion.

For me, the act of making is inseparable from the work of processing feelings and emotions. Visual expression becomes a way of entering that inner labour — giving form to what is otherwise difficult to see or understand. Through the slow repetition of stitch and thread, the work creates a space where emotional residues can be attended to.

Watching the sand bubbler crabs at work, I am struck by their patience. The crab does not attempt to clear the beach in a single gesture. It works through what lies immediately around it, grain by grain. Sometimes the pellets themselves are larger than the crabs that make them.

In my own work, the hand engages in a similar form of labour — attending to what accumulates: the grief that sits unspoken, the anger that has nowhere to go, the fear that returns without warning. The sand bubbler does not merely set the processed sand aside; it digests what it takes in, extracting what can nourish and releasing the rest. Something analogous happens in the slow work of making. As emotional residues are processed rather than suppressed, they lose their density. What was opaque, now finds clarity and relationships can be addressed more consciously.

At another level, it is in that clearing that something deeper becomes reachable. Jung spoke of the collective unconscious — a layer of the psyche beneath personal history, shared across human experience. The relationship we have with ourselves is the only reliable ground we carry through life, and it is only when that ground has been tended — when the accumulated sediment has been worked through — that we become capable of touching what lies beneath the individual: the part of us that is universal—wisdom that has become collectively ours—accumulated through eons of life and living.

Like the patient work of the sand bubbler crab that processes each grain of sand, leaving behind a residue that is delicate and attractive, I imagine that if we did this with our emotional stuff, hard work though it is, we’d be creating these lace-like links between us.

Whatever in our experience of living is not adequately processed—often because the labour feels tedious or time-consuming—returns through unconscious acts and words that can confound and distance relationships. The sand bubbler crabs clean our beaches, so that decaying debris doesn’t leave a stench. Perhaps we could learn something from their labour and its residue.

If my earlier works considered the stain — the mark that remains — this piece turns toward the possibility of working through those residues slowly and attentively, until they begin to form another kind of pattern.

And, I attempt this kind of work beyond my art making. Spending considerable time, often frustrated by having to do so, processing complex feelings to find some measure of clarity. I not only relate to the effort of the sand bubbler; I’m inspired by them to continue with this arduous processing of emotions. Even as I’m often told I’m intense and think too much. I look at them and wonder: do I?

Where Stitching Meets Their Words

Looking at my work—how I stitch, think while I stitch, through the lens of writers and scholars like Glenn Adamson, Tim Ingold, and David Pye, I have begun to understand more clearly what it means for me to take risks while working, and to notice the decisions I make as I go. This awareness doesn’t give me control in any fixed sense, but it keeps me engaged. It keeps me focused on what I am doing. I may not fully know yet what this attentiveness does for me as an artist, but I do know that it sustains my capacity to stay with the work. Knowledge is power, after all, and knowing what I am doing as I do it seems to strengthen my ability to trust, hold, and remain with my decisions.

Yesterday, while I was stitching, I realised a few things about how I make decisions.

What I put on the fabric to begin with determines the kind of line the stitch will take. In this particular piece, I was working with a fallen, dried leaf that had many, many holes in it. It wasn’t brittle to start with, but as I began manipulating the fabric to stitch around the leaf, it started to crumple. I didn’t want to lose that quality. At the same time, I knew I was already taking a risk by working with something so fragile.

I first tried tacking it down with small bits of Fevicol below and above, hoping that would stabilise it without flattening it completely. That didn’t quite work. Eventually, I realised I had to cover the leaf with fabric while stitching around it. That was another decision, and another risk. Once covered, the leaf would be protected for use, exhibition, and time, but it would also be partially obscured.

When I did that, I saw that the fabric softened the intensity of the leaf that I had initially been drawn to. It pushed it down slightly. I had to accept that loss. And I found myself thinking that this was not really a loss at all. When you look at water flowing over sand ripples, with sunlight glinting on the surface and a leaf lying underneath, nothing is fully visible anyway. The leaf is dried and has no reflective power, so this softening felt appropriate. There is gold all around it, reflecting light, and the translucency of the organza fabric helped tone down the intensity of the gold, even though I quite enjoy it, as it is.

On top of the sheer fabric covering the leaf, I worked a lot of buttonhole stitch. It created a lace-like quality while also holding the fabric down. This wasn’t planned in advance. It came from a previous work where I had liked the effect, and I chose to return to that result here. I had been somewhere before. I remembered what this stitch could do, the kind of structure and openness it creates. At the same time, I have done oodles of this kind of buttonhole stitch, building hexagonal, lace-like forms, so there is also familiarity in the hand. As David Pye puts it, “the workmanship of risk is that in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgement, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as the work proceeds.” That feels exactly right here. Present decisions are never innocent. They are shaped by past outcomes. The risk I take is always taken with precedent — something I have done before, learned from, and enjoyed the result of.

I have worked with buttonhole stitch in different ways. Sometimes I create a hole right through the fabric, which I’ve done twice in this small piece. At other times, I only create a hole on the surface fabric and then work an intense buttonhole stitch around it to strengthen that opening. From there, I extend it into a kind of hexagonal, lacy structure. I learned this approach in a workshop with the Stitch Club, with Mirjam Gielen.

I also noticed that I was doing split stitch on one side of the leaf, on the organza overlapping it. The fabric doesn’t cover the leaf completely, and it isn’t stitched flat onto it either. It has a slight three-dimensional quality. Because of the buttonhole stitch along the edge, it curls. I can curl it whichever way I want. Sometimes you can see through it, sometimes you can’t. It depends on how you look. When work is exhibited, it’s usually seen straight on, at eye level, and these shifts might not be immediately visible unless you look closely or from underneath. That too is a risk I’m willing to take.

Sometimes, one loses a lot of the stitch quality during exhibition viewing. Particularly the subtle dimensions of stitch which give so much pleasure. In fact, when stitched work or textiles that are exhibited dramatise to stand alongside more visceral media, eclipsing the otherwise delicacy of the medium and its making methodologies, I often cringe. One aspect of working with textiles, for me, is how the meditative dimension of making absorbs the visceral emotive dimensions of the maker, sublimating rather than screaming. I know that stitching for hours together calms the mind, softens the heartbeat, so I do wonder at this.

While stitching this section, I had started with a very light green thread, but I couldn’t find it again later. I didn’t want to open my entire thread stash just to locate that colour. I chose to continue with what was lying nearby. The next green I picked up was much brighter, and I didn’t want it to dominate. So I worked split stitch in lines, leaving spaces in between. Later, I added a very light blue.

Only after doing this did I realise that if I had filled the area with a single green, it wouldn’t have looked as alive as it does now. This decision came partly from laziness, but it turned out to be the right one. I do this often. When a thread runs out, I don’t stop the work. I respond to what is available. The work changes because of that choice.

Louis Pasteur, the French chemist had observed that “Chance only favours the prepared mind,” enabling one to  correctly interpret, or integrate unexpected results, with one’s prior knowledge. To my mind, chance is also about taking risks, where as David Pye suggests that the “workmanship of risk” depends on the discretion and dexterity that arise from knowing, enabling the maker to use the risk to their advantage, or not. In relation to this piece, the element of ‘chance’ is working with a dried leaf that might tear or collapse. The chance is covering it with fabric and accepting that something of its intensity will be lost. The chance is running out of a thread and choosing not to stop, but to continue with what is at hand. These are real risks. They only work because the hand is prepared, because it already knows how stitch, colour, and material behave. Without that preparation, the same choices would simply be random and possibly unsuccessful—visually gawky.

I also tend not to work with long lengths of thread. This is something I learned from Tom Lundberg during my Fulbright in 2000, when he was my mentor. Short threads force change. Colours shift more often. There is modulation rather than control. That variation keeps me attentive. It keeps the hand thinking.

I finished this section of the piece with a very fine gold thread that I bought online. It’s good-quality thread. I can’t really do split stitch with it, but I can do stem stitch, which is very close, and that worked well.

What’s amazing me at this point is how looking attentively at how I make, even in a small section as this —which is not quite two inches, I’ve learnt so much — something that reading the craft stalwarts and scholars alone, didn’t do. Quite frankly, the writing confused me, but now, I’m discovering it anew.

 

The Knot Of It

 

I’ve been working on  Co-Creation III for too long. It started out, with me wanting to create a border — a kind of ‘hashiya’, where the border is separate yet conducts an oblique dialogue with the central image/painting. (The ‘hashiya’ comes from Mughal miniature paintings were artists used the border in dialogue with the main subject.) I decided that I had been working long enough and just had to finish. I know myself: I could keep adding more and more. I just had to stop working on this piece. But, there were couched areas that needed to be completed.

I continued with couching the six-ply zari thread. It has a rhythm to it. You hold the thread to be couched, and you keep the fabric taut, holding the laid thread close. Because I’m couching large, uneven spaces I don’t use a hoop. Both hands work in tandem as if dialoguing with each other. Left  hand thumb and index finger over the thread to be couched, keeping it in place. Other three fingers below the fabric, keeping it close to the laid thread—light pressure from top and bottom. Right hand, holds the needle between thumb and index finger, little finger and side of hand, over the thread— when it’s slack, keeping the tension-mild but keeping thread straight to avoid the knots. I’ve tried using a hoop but it interrupts the rhythm of long laid threads to be couched. Yes, the laid thread may pucker a bit, but that’s okay because the inspiration, for this piece and others in the series,  is sun glinting off ripples of water.

The same week, an incident occurred in my residential complex that left me feeling exposed. It was xenophobic and violent, and  made me feel unsafe and threatened in my own home. I was preoccupied and agitated. I missed a day or two of stitching because I simply couldn’t settle. I’d sit with the piece in front of me, but the very idea of more thinking — more decisions to be made, felt too large a task.

And when I returned to the couching, I noticed knots coming up.

Before stitching, knotting was already a way of making textile. Not as embellishment, but as structure. Nets, cords, bindings, even early fabrics and carrying slings. Whole surfaces could be created  through knotting, loop after loop. In that sense, knotting isn’t secondary to stitch. It’s older than stitch, and it has its own intelligence and lineage.

When I was learning to weave, one also learnt the weaver’s knot. It’s a really elegant knot: left over right, is the primary instruction I remember—to put the thread in the left hand over the thread in the right hand—and the rest is muscle memory—the hand remembers.

Both threads held between thumb and index finger of left hand. Taking the right hand thread over left hand thumb, holding it down with the 2nd finger of left hand, bringing the right hand thread between left thumb and index finger where the two threads are held. Left hand thread then goes into the loop made by the right hand thread over left thumb, while 2nd finger holds the end of the right hand thread and pull. Voila! The perfect knot.

Quite an instruction to remember—I can’t. I wrote this while observing myself create a weaver’s knot. Stopping frequently to annotate. I’m glad the hand remembers and I don’t have to recount the entire process verbally. I think I’d probably confuse more than guide the hand.

The weaver’s knot was invented as a join that’s flat, allowing the knot to move through the heddles of the loom without encumbrance. Once learnt (1982, for me) it’s hard to forget, but learning it in the  first place, is a challenge. My sister is an avid knitter, I’ve tried to teach her, but it still doesn’t form as easily as I can make it. It’s most useful when knitting or crochet and the ball of yarn finishes—to join another seamlessly.

And then there’s the other meaning of knot, the sailing knot, a measure of speed. One nautical mile an hour. Suddenly the word shifts from snag and interruption to movement and distance. Sailors tie knots that must hold in wind and salt and strain. It makes me think that knotting isn’t a mistake at all. Knotting is older than stitching. Rope, nets, rigging, lashings. The forms of making that come before cloth.

But none of this is what I’m meeting here. I’m not doing macramé. I’m not deliberately making a textile through knots, neither am I traversing nautical miles at sea. I’m in the middle of a stitch rhythm, and the thread knots itself anyway. The snag arrives as interruption, not as design.

 It is really annoying. You can’t leave the knots, because they won’t sit under the couching thread. They form a little loop and sit there— an uncomfortable bulge. What’s strange is that the knot doesn’t happen where I can see it form.  It happens in the slack, in the bit of thread behind and under my right hand, in that length that has its own life. I could swear that I don’t leave it too slack, holding it down carefully, but clearly I am not vigilant enough. It is the only way a knot could form.

I follow the rule of thumb — of keeping the thread no longer than the distance from my index finger to my elbow. Still, even when the thread is quite a bit shorter — quite short in fact, I still get the odd knot. The thread forms a loop into itself. Most of the time I can simply put my needle into the loop and holding the threads that precedes the knot, down with my left hand, pull it upwards with the needle(in my right hand)— and it comes undone with a gentle sound that tells me it’s undone. Something like a ‘khitt’ that’s softly whispered.It’s momentary, a small hesitation, the acknowledging ‘khitt’ and I can keep stitching.

But the other day, I struggled and struggled, and it got worse and worse, until I had to do what I absolutely hate: cut the thread. Cutting the thread feels like admitting defeat. Not because it’s a tragedy, but because I was in rhythm. I was in flow. And now I have to stop, stitch in ends, re-thread, restart. It’s like being pushed out of a trance and get down to the nitty-gritty of mundanity.

And because I’m couching gold thread, there’s a glare with the light. The golden thread reflects light back at me. The glare doesn’t allow me to see my stitches clearly. I try and keep the distance of the stitches within a certain perceived gap, and I’m really focused. The rhythm aids my ability to keep that space— it provides a measure. But when I have to stop for the palaver of cutting the thread, re-threading the needle and finding my place back in the work. It interrupts everything.

The knot has a lineage. The problem is that it arrives uninvited.

Just like the xenophobic assault did: interrupting the rhythm and pace of life. A knot that cannot be undone.

 

What Remains, What Repairs…

“Craft is healing. It helps people feel grounded, purposeful, and whole.”

— Betsy Greer

I spent most of the day stitching.

Yesterday was a long, social day. I’m feeling unsettled. Words cannot quite express my overstimulated mind: teaching a five-week online course, an enriching talk on Hampi, meeting old friends, recriminations, affection, chiding, eating a delicious but heavy meal. Grocery shopping en route to the meetings. Overspending and then returning home to put everything away. Sleep was elusive, as it often is when I’ve done too much.

I need to stitch. I need its somatic, meditative movements. I need thoughts to form, not be dismissed in the way they might be through yoga nidra or meditation.

As the needle enters the cloth and exits again, as the thread tightens and holds, as one action follows another, my day in the world becomes, briefly, coherent.

It’s often said that stitching is healing. But is it? What do we really mean by healing?

We have all seen ruptures of the flesh, wounds that heal. Yet scars remain. The body remembers. Can one truly heal memory, or the recurrence of pain that arises from it?

I have lived with the idea of healing for decades. I am a three-decade-long Reiki practitioner. I practise various modes of energy healing for myself and for others. It is a deeply misunderstood term, and one I have spent years trying to fathom.

Stitching as healing may create a sense of calm, regulation, relief, and an increased ability to cope. These are not trivial states. They matter. They allow one to function, to endure, to remain present. Regulation, not transformation.

This is where the language around healing, including energy healing, needs clarity. Intention alone does not bring about change. Healing practices can support awareness, soften resistance, and create the conditions in which something might shift. But they cannot replace responsibility. They cannot override lived reality. They cannot act in place of recognition or choice. A healing practice may help one cope with exhaustion, grief, or overwhelm, but it cannot decide for us when something continues to tear, when repeated repair is no longer enough, or when it is time to stop and acknowledge the damage.

Healing operates within possibility, not promise. It unfolds only to the extent that a person is able, willing, or ready to respond. Without this participation, healing becomes maintenance, a way of remaining functional within structures that continue unchanged.

Much of what circulates as healing is essentially about making life bearable without altering its underlying structure.

True healing, when it occurs, is rarely gentle. It does not arrive as comfort. It often dismantles rather than restores. In healing parlance, what is latent often rises to the surface when attention is directed inward. This can feel unsettling, even as though something has gone wrong. Old emotions, exhaustion, sadness, or self-dislike may emerge. Physical symptoms too—falls, colds, bouts of flu—are often understood as signals rather than setbacks, pointing toward what needs rest, recognition, or change.

This distinction matters when speaking about stitch and its potential to heal.

When Betsy Greer writes of craft making people feel grounded, purposeful, and whole, these words describe states of coherence and regulation. They do not promise cure or resolution.

Rozsika Parker, in writing  about middle-and upper-class women in Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially the Victorian era, spoke of embroidery as a means of psychic survival. She was studying  women who were excluded from paid work and public life, whose labour was confined to the domestic sphere, and for whom embroidery was not freely chosen but prescribed as part of feminine virtue and value. Parker did not frame this as empowerment, self-expression, healing, or liberation. What she described was far more constrained. For many women living with little agency, embroidery provided structure to time, a way to concentrate attention, and a place to contain anxiety, anger, grief, or frustration that could not be spoken. Often unmarried, or trapped in marriages they could not leave, financially dependent yet intellectually capable, socially silent and expected to appear calm, grateful, and composed, these women could not protest their circumstances or even name their dissatisfaction. Embroidery offered a private, repetitive act, somewhere excess emotion could be placed, a way of enduring without collapsing. Not flourishing. Not transformation. But staying intact. Parker’s insistence was a warning against romanticising needlework: not to mistake endurance for freedom, or survival for repair.

This, reminded me of my visit to Lucknow last April, learning from women engaged in chikankari. Here the context is different, and is not intended as a historical parallel. These were largely Muslim women, many of whom were not permitted to move freely outside the home. They arrived at the atelier covered from head to toe—stepping in wearing burqas, and then, once inside this all-women’s space, unveiled and stitched through the day. The workroom became a contained world — sanctioned, protected, but bounded. Stitch did not alter the structures that governed their lives. It did not offer emancipation. What it offered was time, focus, and a place to speak, share and where attention could rest. Listening to them, and later transcribing those conversations, I was struck by how often stitching appeared not as aspiration or expression, but as continuity — a way of remaining intact within conditions that were unlikely to change.

Repair, in cloth, does not erase damage. It holds a tear. It strengthens an edge. It works with weakness rather than denying it. When I think about repair in this way, it becomes clear that it is not an abstract idea for me, but something I am constantly negotiating through the act of stitching itself. Repair is not something I arrive at conceptually and then apply. It is something that unfolds through attention, constraint, and decision, moment by moment.

I see this most clearly when I think back to how I arrived at the work that day. I was overstimulated, scattered, carrying the residue of too many conversations, obligations, and decisions. Nothing dramatic was wrong, but nothing felt settled either. Stitching did not resolve that state or make it disappear. What it did was hold it. The repetition slowed my breathing. The sequence of actions gave shape to what had been diffuse. The work did not erase the frayed edges of the day, but it strengthened them enough for me to remain present.

I also recognise that the frenzied state was not only about fatigue or overstimulation, but about a lack of clarity. Too many loose threads of thought were creating a sense of chaos. Stitching steadied my breath and slowed the pace enough for those thoughts to come into focus. Once that happened, I could see what needed attention. I made phone calls and  addressed what had been weighing on me instead of carrying it as unnamed anxiety. The stitching did not resolve these issues, but it made it possible to recognise them and act. In that sense, repair was not withdrawal from the world, but a return to it with greater clarity.

Those who have written about craft and making speak of its closeness to lived experience, and of making as a process of correspondence rather than control, where one is in dialogue with material, unspoken perhaps, but real. The material, and how it behaves within the realm of our capacities to interact with it, suggests what we can or cannot do.

As I continue my work on Co-creation III, I am aware of risk at every step. I do not fully control the material. I choose a direction. I commit to a tension, regulate intervals of where the stitch holds the thread, enters the cloth, not always with perfection. Limited by various conditions—eyesight, electric light, glare from shining zari thread and the hued proximity of the thread I couch it with—whatever choices I make within these conditions and my capacity to stitch, skill or lack of it, I live with the consequences. As one does in life.

In this sense, stitch cannot heal the wound. It may effect repairs within the conditions under which the wound can be lived with honestly. Not altering the path, but changing the possibilities of how the path is walked.

And sometimes that is the only kind of healing that is possible.

No miracles. Sometimes not even relief. But an understanding of how the wound, the hurt, even arises.

Within my continued work on Co-creation III, I see this play out repeatedly. A lack of discipline while couching without the fabric stretched on a hoop. The small chaos that emerges when material resists intention. The urge to keep going, to make sense, to hold things together through repetition. Limited by light, eyesight, fatigue, and time, I work within what is possible rather than what is ideal. Each decision holds. Each compromise remains visible.

Stitch does not resolve this.

It asks me to stay with it.

And perhaps that, too, is a form of repair.

 

Observations of Stitching Without A Script

Today, while couching the six ply zari, I found myself moving beyond the original knitted lines. Those lines rose and fell like tidal waves, vertical yet fluid, and I wanted to honour that undulation. At the same time, I had to break it. I couldn’t fill everything. Something had to give.

So the work became a series of decisions. Where to begin. Where to stop. Where the thread should turn. How much of the line to keep. How many lines were enough. I would place the thread, finish one run, put it aside, then stand up and look. Step back. Return. Decide again.

This is where I have arrived through practice. What David Pye named the workmanship of risk describes this precisely: a way of working in which quality is never assured in advance, and where every move carries consequence. Nothing is secured by a plan. The work lives or fails in the moment of making.

When there is a design, you don’t have to do this. You simply follow what has already been decided. But I am not working from a fixed design. I am working from a space I don’t quite have a word for yet, where attention replaces certainty, and where decisions are made in response to what unfolds rather than what is prescribed.

This is often called intuitive, but that feels insufficient. What is actually happening is a conversation. The material pushes back. The line resists or yields. The hand answers. Form emerges through this exchange— what Tim Ingold describes as correspondence: making as an ongoing dialogue rather than an act of control.

The original impulse came from co-creation: the sun on water, water on sand, wind on water, ripples in sand. The glinting light. That moment of recognition that nothing is made alone, that form is always relational. You know this, but sometimes it becomes clear only through the act of looking— being present. And, I’ve chosen to investigate it further through making—stitching.

I am using gold as light. And light, for me, is wisdom. Not ornament, but perception. In that sense, thinking through craft, as suggested by Glenn Adamson, is not an abstract position but something that happens in the work itself, in judgment, hesitation, revision, and care. As I read his book on the subject, I became curious as to its academic stance. Adamson is not a maker, he’s an art historian and scholar, attempting to locate craft within the fine art mileu. I am too, in a sense. But his writing inspired to me to articulate the nuances of my stitch-craft-art making practice from within it, rather than as a academic who observes, their uses and writes.

Working so much with gold has also made me more aware of how this material is received. Zari, sheen, surface, what might easily be dismissed as bling. Even though it comes from a long and specific lineage, the certified art world is uneasy with this kind of material density and materiality. Textiles are of interest to the art world today, but they are expected to transcend themselves, to become something else in order to be taken seriously.

What I am doing does none of that. These are small works. Twelve inches, fourteen, sixteen at most. They stay firmly within the language of stitch, of couching, of repetition and adjustment. I am not trying to dismantle categories or reinvent technique. I am staying inside what these materials already know how to do. In fact, I revel in the materiality — in the infinite possibility that textile, embroidery, crochet, knit and their materials give scope for, in terms of expression—making art. And for me, art is what Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote: that it wasn’t what you did, but how you did it, that made it art—devotion and  presence presided rather than  the intellectual concept that fine art now revers.

My work is demanding. It asks for sustained attention, judgment, and presence. Much of it is about watching myself work, noticing how decisions are made, how hesitation enters, how form slowly clarifies. I work as an artist, but I do so through material insistence rather than conceptual distance. The thinking is not above the work. It is embedded in the stitch, in the process, in the insistence of the hand.

So each day I am finding my way through it. Slowly. Sometimes reluctantly. There are moments when, despite stitching being somatic and grounding, I resist returning to it. Not because it is difficult, but because it demands decision-making. Presence. Accountability.

This is where risk lives. Not in grand gestures, but in choosing without a script. In staying with uncertainty long enough for the work to reveal what it needs to become.

There is also a question that sits alongside all of this, and I don’t yet have a clear answer to it. While academics may want to analyse what the craftsperson does — how decisions are made, where risk enters, how the hand moves, how the material responds — language always comes later. It describes what has already happened.

What I am more interested in is what this awareness actually does to the making.

At the moment, I find myself watching myself work. Not judging or correcting, just noticing. How a decision forms. Where hesitation enters. When a line feels complete and when it doesn’t. It feels a bit like being a witness to yourself while you are still living, still inside the act.

Perhaps the merit of this awareness is not only for the person making the work. If the making is clearer, if the decisions are more present, then the work itself may carry that clarity. It may also allow the viewer to come closer, to sense how the piece was arrived at, not through explanation but through looking.

This may shift the experience of viewing. Less emphasis on what the work is saying, and more attention to how it came into being. A slower, more intimate relationship with the work.

At the same time, for me, meaning  and process are entangled. What the work says emerges through how it is made. The decisions, the risks, the material itself — all of this shapes the work’s voice. I am not interested in choosing between concept and craft. The work holds both.

It is also clear to me that  reading Adamson, Pyle, Ingold and others has fed back into the work. I might not have thought of what I am doing in terms of risk, or noticed it so clearly, if I hadn’t read David Pye, or thought about correspondence in the way Tim Ingold describes it, or encountered Glenn Adamson’s writing on thinking through craft. The ideas did not replace the experience, but they gave me a language that sharpened my attention. I began to see what I was already doing.