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.

Texture Is The Narrative

It all began with a singular question.

After listening to a talk by Savia Veigas at Arthashila Goa, I found myself wondering about her use of stitch in relation to narrative. She emphasised that the visual carried the work — that the stitch itself was not something she thought about in depth. And yet, looking at her work, I could see stitch doing things she hadn’t named.

 

This left me with a more fundamental question: what does stitch actually do? Is it only a line, like charcoal or ink, or does it carry something else entirely — can it elucidate a narrative, shape it in ways not immediately visible?

 

When an artist chooses charcoal, watercolour, or oil, the medium shapes the expression. Charcoal smudges and resists precision. Watercolour bleeds and disperses. Oil holds and saturates. The material is not neutral.

 

From my perspective, stitch is even less neutral. And I find myself seeing it in narrative visual  embroideries too.

 

A split stitch gives a clear, controlled line. It holds a curve, allows detail, builds density, and can modulate colour with great subtlety — as medieval church embroideries in Europe demonstrate. I am drawn to its flatness, especially when contrasted with other textures.

 

A satin stitch smooths a surface into colour, though never entirely flat. A cross stitch breaks the surface into a grid, allowing colour to mix in the eye rather than in the thread. I often work with a freer version — what I call a ‘crazy cross stitch’ — where the grid loosens and layering becomes possible, building intricate shading through accumulated color and stitches.

A buttonhole stitch can close a form or open it into lace, depending on how it is worked. I like opening it out into a permeable hexagonal lace, allowing one layer to be seen through another — particularly on transparent fabrics like silk organza, where fine zari thread lends an ethereal quality.

Crochet shifts the surface altogether. It introduces relief — a whole new dimension within the ambit of stitch. Even in fine thread, it sits on the surface, creating another fabric rather than merging into the base.

Each stitch carries its own behavioural tendency. It is this that shapes what can be said through it.

 

In my own work, which has gradually moved towards an abstract narrative, I choose stitches for what they do to the surface.

In my work, texture is not an addition. It is the story.

 

At present, I am working with what I call crab lace. Crocheted nets are layered, joined, and stitched through. The top layer is made of varied yarns — tightly spun mercerised cotton, slubby threads, tencel — held together using an Irish crochet netting technique and placed over undyed silk organza.

Beneath it lies another crocheted net in pale grey, resting on a mid-grey open weave cotton fabric with its selvedge cut and threads unevenly drawn apart. Below this sits another layer of organza. The piece currently holds multiple layers, though not consistently across its full surface of 1.5 x 1 metres.

The grey open weave is not tacked. It adheres lightly to the organza. The pale crochet is only loosely held. As I stitch the upper layer, the thread passes through all layers, binding them into a single body.

 

Earlier, I tried to keep the stitching invisible, slipping the thread beneath the crochet lines. Then I stopped. Why should this disappear?

The movement of the thread across layers, its irregular path, its appearance and disappearance — all of this is part of the texture. So I let it remain.

 

A pale grey (polyester cotton) thread moves across whites and off-whites, soft greys, green-grey, dark grey and black — the surface of the crocheted net. Sometimes it shows, sometimes it recedes. That fluctuation matters. It begins to map an inner terrain, the texture of emotional work.

 

The form itself comes from watching sand bubbler crabs. Not by imitation, but through observation. Their lace-like formations on the beach are delicate in appearance, yet formed through repetitive labour. The crab takes in sand, processes it, releases it. Again and again. A repetitive, arduous labour of feeding and cleansing.

 

For me, the parallel is: a thought, a feeling returns. You examine it. You turn it. You release it. Then it returns again, slightly altered. There is a back and forth until something clears — a moment of knowing, of clarity.

 

The work attempts not just to hold that process, but to create a tactile evocation of it.

The layering, the density, the interruptions, the small fragments of crochet and open fabric inserted between layers — all of it builds a surface that is not smooth, not resolved. It holds effort. It holds time.

The piece has not been easy to work on. It is large. It requires patience. There have been days of only looking, without the courage to stitch.

 

After tacking the top layer down, I find it is beginning to reveal its layered texture. I have been thinking about the spaces between — large areas of open ground that I want to work with subtle textures.

 

I have thought of circular running stitch, as in Kantha. The stitch has a distinctive texture of its own, and when the thread is pulled, the ripple effect is exaggerated — particularly on layered cotton.

The repetition is meditative, its circularity perhaps mirroring the circularity of emotional processing. But I hesitate. It works well on layered cotton; on organza, the ripple flattens. And the surface must not be crowded.

I am also considering buttonhole stitch — beginning from a central opening and building outward into a radial lace, following the patterning of the sand bubbler’s residual pellets. Perhaps in conversation with the running stitch, though I remain unsure.

This uncertainty is part of the process.

 

On the surface, the day moves normally. Cooking, laundry, conversations. But underneath, something continues — a sorting, a returning, a clearing. The texture is that underside, always present, clarity emerging when the day is done or in early morning quiet.

 

It is the texture — the gnawing in the gut, the pull at the back of the throat, the stiffness in muscles—paying attention to them allows clarity to emerge. It is what makes it possible to read, to research, to teach, to be present.

 

The work of clearing the mind is not separate from the work of making art.