Light Pieces

Light-box Installation (2020)

“We stand witness today, to the concretisation of divisions” - The Shrine Gallery

Among several stories of origins sits a tiny tale of embroidery - that of a traveler who once arrived at a peasant’s abode thirsty and asked for water to drink. In retun for having been offered the peasant’s kindness, the traveller taught his family the art and craft of Chikan-kari. Employing backstitch, chain stitch and hemstitch, the patterns of affection since have relied on the rhythms of the hands that stitch, and on the thicknesses of affiliations that engraved and washed them into history. This series - Light Pieces I/II/III - points towards the warp and weft of social fabric, and the resilience it displays to work around spaces that threaten it. Interweaving thread-work and political struggles into an intricate play of text and shadow, Light Pieces ask if we know how to read the pattern differently, and how to register an emergent shift in the contemporary.