This research talks about my assessment of personal possession- one of the saris from my grandmother’s collection that I carried with me to London from India. It marks my perspective of my late grandmother’s sari, who I never got a chance to meet. Hence, being connected to her yet being a complete stranger highly reflects on my curiosity about this object. I intend to create a scope of dialogue where textile meanings are transformative in relation to time-space saturated by my experiences of textiles from my own family history.
Further, reflecting on these shifting meanings of a family object, I have been keeping a journal in which I construct commonalities imbued with personal meanings where the sari becomes the protagonist.
The sari must feel strange, to have interacted with my body. The way I treat it, standing for an hour or so, struggling to wrap it around me, being my vulnerable self, untying it back and forth, being indecisive in collating my feelings about the fabric, and praying for it to not come off my waist while walking in it, versus the way my grandmother would have treated it; I imagine her carefully storing it and delicately wrapping it across herself in a minute or two, her fingers easily performing a puppetry show with each pull, pleat and tuck placed securely around her waist for the day.
