Kantha is traditionally understood as a form of hand embroidery from Bengal in South Asia rendered on layers of ageing sari and dhoti cloth joined together to form a quilt with designs depicting patterns, sacred text, mythical lore, and everyday experiences of women: Kantha formed a significant part of the wedding trousseau and symbolised resilience, renewal, and nurture. Kantha is also a composite word combining Kaan or ear, Katha or story and Kath or units of land.

Thereby, a Kantha is considered movable property, with women exercising control over the ownership, exchange, or sale, sometimes alleviating economic adversity and distress. But we could focus on the aesthetic over the financial and redefine a Kantha as a site encapsulating sensitive observation, reflection, and articulation by the maker. For example, touching a Kantha might reactivate a work and the maker's spirit, invite reverie, and interlink family and community such that a Kantha metamorphosises into a bridge between people, places, and stories across multiple generations.

As part of my PhD project, I refined creative processes that reclaim the qualities of improvisation, observational witnessing of the time, community connectedness, and sustainability associated with Kanthas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Bengal and reconnected with my maternal heritage by recontextualising Kantha as a visual language, to actively relive the tradition.

I tested new and contemporary materials, imagined new forms and content, and created expanded formats for presentations which engaged with architecture and referenced stories of my time. The works conversed with a diverse, inclusive and transnational audience, bringing Kantha to aspirationally plural, cultural landscapes. Striving to counteract the silencing of women’s voices that had embroidered /spoken through Kanthas of the past but have since become quietened in museums far from Bengal. In this endeavour, I acknowledge the support of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) for access to Kanthas from the Stella Kramrisch collection, which has informed the visual vocabulary of my works.

ReKalibrating Kantha (2021): Installation at The Block, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Kelvin Grove Campus at Meanjin/ Brisbane, Australia.

The dark space of The Block at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) creates an altered space, metaphorically referencing the universe's black holes from where I reclaim Kanthas that I dramatically spotlight. The audience is invited to journey with a passage opening behind suspended works. Select Kanthas from the PMA are presented as projections, highlighting the details, and an open studio and AIR space welcome discussions. Video recordings of my drawing on portable sheets and on glass play to music composed and played on the guitar, by my son, Jason Aggarwal, as comfortable chairs and a central shrine with a rug conjure a sense of home.

The paintings are on large sheets of cardboard, a ubiquitous marginal material that invites drawing, painting, collage, sewing, and writing. They suspend as sarees or textiles and stack easily for storage, light enough for me to care for them physically like my mother did her sarees.

Pictures of individual works follow the documentation of the installation at the Block. The Kantha paintings on cardboard are double-sided and reference ideas of Dorukha, and they are 312 cm long and 182 cm in height or 122.83 inches long and 71.65 inches in height.

Found dolls transmogrified into coloured other beings reference Shakti as a proto-feminist, undefinable but benevolent presence. They began to inhabit the sites created by the paintings, evoking Devi in terracotta temples with narrative reliefs I saw over five years of my undergraduate studies in Santiniketan, Bengal.

The photographs are credited to Carl Warner.

Esho, welcome.