At home in prescript There is an exhibition of embroidered textile art created by 10 women artisans from the Lambadi community. The tasks are stitched on organic cotton and attracted to memory and immediate environment – trees that surround them, stories heard from the elderly, birds mark seasonal changes, millet grown in their fields, and domestic life intricacies.
Conducted at the gathering, a 160-year-old house with cool floors and sun corridors in Bengaluru was restored, open, home-like setting shows the show of intimacy. Visitors leave their shoes on the threshold, enter the barefoot – an unspecified gesture of reverence and ground. This simple task changes our way of attachment. We step slowly. We stay for a long time. We complete the works not as a distant observers, but as audience in a room filled with stories. Each embroidery along with each embroidery combines anecdote texture, texture and voice with each embroidery, which makes the gallery feel less like a performance and is more like a gathering.
Settings like opening of gathering gives a sense of intimacy to the setting show photo credits: R Kishore Kumar
At home in prescript In the meeting. Photo Credit: R Kishore Kumar
A ‘house’ residence
The works were developed through a four-month artist Residency, which was hosted by the Porgai Artsons Association during a “at-Hum” residence, an artist support model where women continued to work instead of displacing in unfamiliar institutional settings instead of staying in their own context (in a studio). Curate by designer Ansu Arora, the residency invited women to reflect, remember and remagin from within their own fields.
One of the 10 artisans, Gita, Green Catchs the artwork of embroidery with green bee-eats Photo Credit: Melanie Hindes
Porgai co-founder Lalita Regi, which means that pride and dignity in the Lambadi dialect, and a senior doctor in tribal health initiative provide information about the complexity of participation: “Women had to make many options in their domestic life before committing to residence. Fed, children paid attention, children paid attention, work and farm labor have their own complex challenges.
The atmosphere of trust and co-building gave shape to work. In the months, hesitant gave the way of confidence, and the familiar grammar of the long embroidery turned into some layered, narrative and imaginative.
Many embroidery takes a fickleness that feels both intentionally and deeply individual: a crooked bird, a smiling cow, a parrot with twinkling eyes, offers a subtle eyelid with a parrot, a bee-eating. These are not naive ornaments, but are visible signatures of a relationship with the natural world that is family, mutual and full of mirtha. These textiles do not have passive scenes to flora and organisms. They are family members. Leaves and wings have humor, memory and mischief – a way to be with nature suggests that is less about dominance and more about cameradri.
Two of the long women with their artwork. Photo Credit: Melanie Hindes
Rejecting curns as an act of control
The association has been active in Critingi for more than 18 years. It began with a revival of the long embroidery and developed in a cooperative model that focuses as a laborer, not as a laborer, but as a knowledge holder, designer and cultural patron. Today, there are 60 women in the group. They are paid appropriately, maintaining control of their process, and decide as a group.
The duration of this exhibition reflects that ethos. “Very often, cursor becomes a function of control – a practice in the author,” says Arora. “With Porgai, I wanted to hold space without shaping it. Artists already know what they want to say.”
Firewood Collection | Photo Credit: Vandita Bajpai
Each artist began with a six -inch square. The minor frame acts as scaffolding and probability. From there, they embroidered both independently and simultaneously, shaped the tasks that were once unique and collective, a total of 26 pieces – the shortest 21 “x 11.5” and the largest 50 “x 36.5”. In some cases, they stitched their fantasies shoulder to shoulder: 10 interpretation of the sky, each in a different color, texture and mood, was stitched simultaneously in a large tapestry of the atmosphere.
10 interpretation of the sky | Photo Credit: Melanie Hindes
In the second, they detected the ground under their feet, providing stones, shadows, leaves and soil with sensitivity to the texture and light. Other functions emerged through collaborative storyboarding: large pieces of fabric were mapped and divided between them to portray daily life scenes – a wedding, an agricultural routine, choreography of water collection. He used more than 21 traditional lambadi stitches (eg Maki And Burai) And some new inventions were made by artisans.
Each task is accompanied by a note from its manufacturer. Blue talks about ancestors. Lavanya dreams of bees. Parimala embroides Porgai Center to remember her grandson. The stream of Celvi flows with layered fabric that mimics rock unwanted.
Blue, who talks about ancestors. Photo Credit: Himanshu Dimri
Arora also reflects this ethos within a broad design discourse. “The definition of luxury is changing. It is now about a story and human connection items-a strategy, talking about the person behind the item, slowly and deliberately, in place with care, morality and non-exploitative systems. Our subcontinent’s rich clothes and crafts are beautifully alive in this light.”
Beyond the revival
In India, the world of art continues to reflect the division of caste and class. “Art” is a gallery-human, urban and elite class. The “craft” is not an evaluation of rural, feminine, lower-caste-and systematically. Porgai This binary rejects not through logic but through a claim. They perform embroidered work with ideological clarity, formal integrity and cultural density. They are art. They are testimony. They are a system of knowing.
Arts with ideological clarity and cultural density. Photo Credit: Himanshu Dimri
As Arora noted, “Many textile designers and professional revival are working in all of the friends. I hope that we will all be nourishing all these communities in the ways that make them self-sufficient. As designers and facilities, as designers and facilities, the success of our work when it is temporary-when we can eventually do out our own people, we ourselves and evils and blooms.
Porgai is okay that promises. It is a body of work where the procedure and product align, where there is a method not after care. This suggests that aesthetics should not be separated from morality. This can be mutual, and beautiful things can be made without violence.
At home in prescript Till tomorrow is seen in the meeting.
Essayists and teachers write on design and culture.
Published – 26 April, 2025 06:12 pm IST
