Par Nair

a touching

This piece features a collaborative poem hand embroidered onto the artist's mother's saree. A floating embroidery technique in incorporated so that the piece may be viewed from both front and back. From the front, the letters appear full and from the back, dotted, empty and knotted up. By braiding together languages of two worlds, the work is witness to how language is not a neural tool.The presence of the hand in the labour-intensive process of hand embroidery in this piece implies how we may touch or not touch our mothers and grandmothers. The work’s formal qualities may refer to themes of hybridity, double consciousness, fragmentation, longing and intergenerational translations and knowledge transmissions.