Kutch Cuttings

I’ve been carrying these pieces of fabric for almost eight years. When I travelled through India in 2018 there was very little I bought, collected, held onto. Only a couple of very precious pieces that I could warrant space in my backpack for.

Some of these were among those. I picked a deep red purple cloth in a back street market in the epic yet humble town of Bhujodi, in Kutch. A small centre in the far west of Gujarat. Originally it was a turban, so finely woven, its previous life as a garment of some ancient herdsman unimaginable to me.
It was stained by years of use. I tried to wash it, several times and several approaches over several years.
I grew to appreciate the depth and memory carried in this cloth, inseparable from it. I held onto it, to special for just anything. Every now and then I’d pick it up and try to apply it to some project, but no, not yet, not quite.
And then all of a sudden there it is. On the cutting table, with the perfect companions, insight, inspiration, to affix it newly in time. To hold it up, captured, reconfigured in response to what is here now. A practice in deep intuition, in dialogue with an unnameable but deeply tangible memory, history, how it came to be, how it relates to the forms it found itself in conversation with, bits from other things, previous scraps, gathered and held and transformed in the never ending cycle of coming together and falling apart and bringing back together in new relationship that seems to be the eternal law of all things