On our last FEEDBACK FRIDAY we had Shradha Kochhar. Shradha, born in Delhi, India, is a textile artist and knitwear designer now based in New York. Best known for her home spun and hand knitted ‘khadi’ sculptures using ‘kala cotton’ – an inherently organic cotton strain indigenous to India, her work is at an intersection of material memory, sustainability and intergenerational healing. Focusing on generating a physical archive of personal and collective south Asian narratives linked to women’s work, invisible labor and grief, the work is large scale and will exist beyond whispers over generations.
Check out Shradha’s work on Instagram.
Watch the recording below:
From Shradha:
The work is made from hand spinning ‘Kala cotton’ – a cotton crop indigenous to India on a portable booklet spinning wheel (charkha) and hand knitting it into textures and structures that mimic the skin on our bodies.
Focusing and investigating resources lost and born out of colonization in India such as ‘Khadi’ – a self reliant and equitable practice of textile making and ‘Kala Cotton’, a miracle cotton crop that sustains completely on seasonal rainfall as solutions to climate change, water shortage, soil degradation and social inequity.
Built from an ongoing library of seed bank that documents indigenous cotton strains found across the world, unraveling the intersection of words – ‘cotton’, ‘cloth’, ‘colonization’ and ‘community’. My mission is to understand the potential in soil and to establish an alternate system of textile farming and making, that discourages modern technology that feasts on the felling of forests and extraction of resources.
FEEDBACK FRIDAY
If you are not familiar with FEEDBACK FRIDAY, every week, we speak with dyers, artists, scientists and scholars about our favorite topic, natural dyeing and color. Curated by Amy DuFault, Botanical Colors’ Sustainability Director and presented by Botanical Colors’ Founder Kathy Hattori.
We even have our own theme song thanks to musician Jimmie Snider (click here to hear more of his music including a brand new song Looking Out The Window)!