Sudhata Jarakan

Healing and Hurting

This work is centred around objects which I have collected from my Nanima (Grandmother), which I have replicated, and reformed into bodies of art objects. These objects are made of Sari falls (a strip of cloth that is usually added to a sari bottom to protect its edge) and the serviettes embroidered by Nanima.

The serviette piece consists of the white serviettes onto which Nanima has embroidered what looks like with black/brown bodies labouring bodies. My addition, are brown paper squares, that mimic the serviette, but are a reminder of brown bodies. These objects, used as domestic and everyday items are also a subtle reminder of the colonial gaze that we are sometimes oblivious to, the same gaze that my Nanima would have replicated, without an awareness of who is gazing and what is being represented by the brown stitched body, on the white plane of the cloth.

For me, the process of sewing represents ideas of domestication and violence, simultaneously. They are a personal reference point to both my grandmother and the silent abuse faced by my mother. The Sari falls also holds connotations of imposing ‘purity’ and my questioning is through the repetition of the many white lines. Here, the asymptotic convergences exists as the idea of the non-linear, collapsing and on-going process of healing and hurting from colonial and patriarchal violence’s.