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.

 

A Walk With The Chitari

I often drive down to Sawantwadi for Ayurvedic treatments. It’s about an hour’s drive through the Western Ghats, across vast tracts of green fields and rivers. Over the last few years, I must have been there ten times, perhaps more. Each time, I told myself that I would visit Chitari Aali. And each time, I didn’t.

This week, I finally did.

I left early. I had time. I stopped at the Sawantwadi Palace, asked for directions while having a cold coffee, then followed the route I was given. I parked the car just below the aali and walked up. The market rose on a hill, a fairly steep climb, lined with all kinds of wares being sold along the way. At the top, I turned right and found a couple of small shops selling wooden toys, painted objects, and familiar Chitari forms.

I entered the first shop and said, quite simply, that I wanted to see where the work was made.

A young man named Prabhakar came out. He told me that his elder brother was the designer and that he could take me to their factory. It was in Kolgaon, about four kilometres from there. I said yes.

He sat in the car and I drove to Kolgaon.

The workshop was registered as Kamalanayan Handicraft Centre in the name of Pratibha G. Chitari, Amit’s wife. We climbed the stairs to the first floor, took off our chappals, and entered the space. The building was semi-constructed. There were no windows, only openings for them. No doors, only door frames. The staircase had no banister. The floor was bare cement. As I walked around, I noticed cobwebs everywhere. The machines were carefully covered, I imagine because they are expensive, costing a few lakhs each.

It was only after arriving that I learnt it was a Monday, when the region does not get electricity. So no production was happening. The machines were silent.

And yet, work was still going on.

Bhargav, the youngest brother, brought Amit to meet me. As we talked, Amit sat down to paint a large Ganjifa wall piece depicting the Dashavatara of Vishnu—a commissioned work. There were only three workers present that day. One was packing wooden fruits made from moulds. Two others were preparing wooden panels for painting, applying Fevicol, sanding, polishing.

Before Amit arrived, I spoke briefly to a couple of them. Sonali Chauhan had grown up in this village, married here, and has been working in the workshop for about five years. She handles most of the preparatory processes. I asked her what the work felt like to her, how she thought about it, how she experienced it.

All she said was,  “achcha lagta hai.”

I asked why, what she liked about it. She paused, as if to think, but merely reiterated, “achcha lagta hai.”

There were no words for it, perhaps no need to think. Perhaps the language lay in the doing itself. Sustained, skilled making is known to generate a particular bodily chemistry: endorphins that soften effort, dopamine that registers quiet satisfaction when action meets intention, and oxytocin associated with calm, trust, and nervous-system ease. These states do not arrive as thoughts or explanations. They register as sensation, steadiness, absorption, a sense that the body is at home in what it is doing. Articulated simply as “achcha lagta hai”, this is not a lack of language, but a bodily coherence that does not ask to be translated.

What I am trying to name here is not what she lacks, but what I am attempting to do. Her “achcha lagta hai” is a complete articulation within the conditions of her work. My search for language belongs to a different practice, one that asks what happens when attention, reflection, and articulation are allowed to accompany making, not to replace embodied satisfaction, but to create another kind of value around working with the hand.

It was only after this exchange that I began speaking more fully with Amit. One of the biggest surprises was learning that he had studied at the JJ School of Art and later worked in the film industry, before choosing to return to the family profession. He is a fourth-generation Chitari artisan and introduced himself quite simply as Amit Chitari.

His father worked without machines. Amit works with them. The machines do not replace the hand, they assist it. He explained that earlier, the left hand would turn the wood and the right hand would shape it. Now, the machine does the work of the left hand, while the right hand continues to shape. The intelligence of the hand remains.

They use woods like shivan, jamun, mango, and sheesham

, woods often considered waste wood. Shivan, in fact, is a wood I know well; my own desk is made from it. Amit told me they use roughly a thousand gun-feet of wood, though whether that was per month or per year was not entirely clear. What was clear was that government support is minimal, permissions are complicated, and survival dictates scale and repetition.

What struck me was not the absence of skill or intelligence, but the absence of time. No time to finish the building. No time to install windows or doors. No time to clean the space. No time to pause and articulate what the work means, how it feels, or where it might go next.

When I spoke to Amit about my own practice, about how sometimes the needle seems to take over, to hold sway, he understood immediately. But he didn’t have a language for it.

And that stayed with me.

Chitari art is not native to Sawantwadi, though it is now closely associated with it. The craft has its roots in Cuncolim in South Goa, where the Chitari community practised wood carving, painting, and lacquer work. Historical accounts suggest that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, members of the Bhonsle royal family encountered Chitari artisans while in Goa. When the Bhonsles later established themselves in Sawantwadi, these artisans are believed to have travelled with them.

Over time, Sawantwadi became a centre for Chitari work, particularly wooden toys, lacquered objects, and later Ganjifa playing cards, shaped by royal patronage and market demand. The craft adapted in order to survive.

Today, the Geographical Indication tag for Chitari art is held by the Sawantwadi Palace, not by individual artisans or the town at large. While this offers visibility and institutional recognition, it also fixes the craft within a controlled framework. Artisans continue to carry the skill, labour, and continuity of the tradition, but authorship, naming, and the right to define what counts as Chitari largely sit outside their individual control.

Knowing this history made my visit to the workshop feel differently weighted. What I was seeing was not simply a family business struggling with time and resources, but a lineage shaped by migration, patronage, and survival, a craft that has learned to endure by staying close to what is sanctioned and saleable. As Amit put it, “hum apna kuch nahin daal sakte”, we cannot add anything of our own.

It surprised me that, despite having studied Fine Arts at a prestigious institution, Amit did not feel drawn towards creating even small departures from the Chitari script, forms that might retain technical and material continuity while allowing some personal inflection.

In other craft sectors, particularly textiles, one has seen innovation emerge through exposure to new markets, foreign buyers, and collaborations with designers and artists. The infrastructure often remains the same, the looms, the courtyards, the animals nearby, but the product is reimagined to meet new contexts.

Perhaps this is what is missing in Chitari practice, not ability, but exposure. There is enough business within the known script that there is no necessity to devise new forms or colours.

Craft and hand-making are among the oldest human inclinations. I remember reading, long ago, that it took five thousand years for sculptors to perfect the meditative repose of the Buddha, generations refining an eye, a fold, a posture, inching towards stillness. Today, we are no longer perfecting skill in that way. We are inventing beyond it. Variety and novelty define the predilections of the marketplace.

At the level of Chitari practice, the work is not oriented towards representational improvement or personal meaning-making in the way contemporary practitioners like myself might frame it. It is oriented towards subsistence, carrying forward a cultural and family lineage through repetition, skill, and continuity.

Amit barely has time to meet market demand, to keep the workshop running, to generate income. Sitting with this, I found myself turning inward, asking questions about my own practice.

As I write this, I am aware that these questions have been arising alongside my own stitching practice. In recent weeks, sitting with cloth and thread, I have been paying attention to posture, to the way the needle sometimes seems to take over, to how memory does not return as narrative but as structure. Unlike the Chitari workshop, I have the scope to notice this, to dwell, to articulate it. That difference is not one of imagination, but of conditions. What I am able to reflect on in stitching is not separate from what I witnessed in Kolgaon; it is shaped by a different ecology of time, language, and permission.

But this also raised its own set of questions. What am I doing. Why am I doing it. Does paying attention to process, going deeper into it, create a different kind of value. Does it deepen understanding. Does it change how craft is seen or valued. And can that kind of attention ever be of relevance to craftsmen like Amit.

I don’t have answers yet. What I have is an encounter, a space, a set of hands at work, and a growing awareness of how differently thinking and making are allowed to unfold.

Three decades ago, when I first began working as an artist-craftsperson, my impulse was to bring that work into an art gallery space, to see whether visibility and context might generate value. Over time, I realised that the gallery was not enough. It could show the work, but not the thinking, the negotiations with material, the discipline of repetition, or the quiet intelligence of the hand. This stitch journal emerged from that recognition. It is an attempt to invite the reader inside practice, to attend to how history shapes and material behaves, how posture shapes attention, how the hand learns, insists, adapts. In setting my own practice alongside encounters such as this one with the Chitaris, I am not proposing improvement or intervention. I am asking whether language, attention, and reflection might create a different kind of value for working with the hand, one that I can articulate from where I stand, and that I hope may, in time, also speak back to traditions that have rarely been asked to speak for themselves.

For now, that is enough to sit with.