San Sentense
XXL Gallery, Mumbai
2024
​​
i remember it from my womb (9 panels)
​Kasavu mixed with tissue, red threads, loom parts
28” x 22”x 4” (Each panel)
2023
​
Lakshmi addresses her long-standing artistic interest in questions of identity, body and belonging through the traditional weave of kasavu (white and gold textile of Kerala). Made in collaboration with the weaving communities of Balaramapuram, who have been continuing the kasavu tradition for almost 200 years, this work presents an intergenerational conversation of community, craft and skill.
The work foregrounds the complexities that define the politics of cloth and body, delving into the intersectionality of material, socio-cultural structures, and gender codes. The body turns into a powerful symbolic surface on which hierarchies are demarcated and even metaphysical commitments to culture are inscribed.
Lakshmi imagines this work as a response to the story narrated by her master weaver “i know how to weave from my mother’s womb”. She questions whether the kasavu textile can em-“body” the history that went into its making? The focus is on the distant yet integral relationship between the bodies who wear the kasavu and the bodies that weave them. The wearing body carries the privilege of the textile while negating the weaving body. The work brings agency & presence back to the weaver’s body by invoking the foetal form onto the kasavu textile highlighting the umbilical relationship between the kasavu textile and the bodies that make them.
​
​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Lakshmi weaves the four trauma response words – fight, flight, freeze, fawn in a unique weave that seems almost as though the words are trapped within the kasavu textile. The work invokes a visceral and tactile perception almost like the trauma response themselves. In referencing the survival priming of the body, the parallel analogy lies within the laboured hand woven threads of the kasavu, that is fighting to stay afloat and carry forward its legacy in the face of mechanized alternatives.
In the persistence to anchor questions of materiality and loss through her practice, Lakshmi draws attention to the community and the bodies that come together in the narrative of the craft. The work stands as multifaceted conversation that addresses the material, political, and economic hierarchies surrounding the two-hundred-year-old tradition of kasavu.
Respond.
Kasavu, loom wood, red threads, black threads
36” x 36”
2023
