Circular Podcast with Ekta Kaul

Can mending and repair be used as self care? How can the traditions we’ve studied impact our current actions towards sustainability? Are we too disconnected from our past? What drives the culture of mending?

On today’s episode, I’m talking to Ekta Kaul, an award-winning London based artist. Her artistic practice is focused on creating narrative maps that explore places, history and belonging through stitch. A pared back aesthetic coupled with a considered use of graphic marks and lines form the core elements of her work. These are underpinned by a thoughtful approach to making with meaning, a deep interest in heritage and a firm commitment to sustainability.

Below is a transcript of our conversation. Find the full episode available to listen on Spotify here.

 

INTRO

I’m Katie Treggiden and this is circular. A podcast exploring the intersections of craft design and sustainability. Join me as I talk to the thinkers, doers, and makers of the circular economy. These are the people who are challenging the linear take, make-waste model of production and consumption and working towards something better in this series. We’re talking about repair. And I think repair and mending is a part of us that needs healing.

 

GUEST SNIPPET

I think repair and mending is a part of us that needs healing. I think it invites us into this whole conversation of what can I do to make a difference, even if it is a very, very small difference. What can I do to make a connection to the wisdom of the past that I think we have lost a little bit, especially here in the west, and to creativity? I feel that the fact that you’ve added something of your own to a preexisting, straight-off-the-shelf thing is already giving us creative agency in making a difference. I think for all of these reasons, things are shifting, and things are changing, and it makes me optimistic.

 

GUEST INTRO

Ekta Kaul is an award-winning, London-based artist. Her practice is focused on creating narrative maps that explore places, history and belonging through Stitch. A pared-back aesthetic, coupled with a considered use of graphic marks and lines, form the core elements of her work. These are underpinned by a thoughtful approach to making with meaning, a deep interest in heritage and a firm commitment to sustainability. She has appeared on BBC Radio Four’s Front Row, won the Cockpit Arts Textile Prize and has work in the collections of the Crafts Council, Liberty London, the Gunnersbury Museum and private collectors.

 

GUEST INTERVIEW PART 1

Katie

Ekta, thank you so much for joining me. I’m so excited to talk to you about all things mending and repair, and specifically Kantha, which I know you’re an expert in, but we will come on to that. I would like to start by asking you the question I usually start these interviews with, which is how did mending and repair show up in your childhood and early life?

 

Ekta

Hi Katie. It’s just so lovely to be here and to be talking about repair and mending with you and Kantha and all things textiles. I’m really, really excited, and what a great question to begin with, going back to the roots. I grew up in India, and my childhood was steeped in academia. Both my parents are Entomologists.

 

Katie

Hang on; I’ll stop you there: what’s an Entomologist?

 

Ekta

They are scientists that study insects.

 

Katie

Oh, wow. I didn’t know that. That’s fascinating.

 

Ekta

Yes. Between going to my parents’ lab, which I remember distinctly, was lined with specimens, drawers upon drawers of insect specimens and things kept in vials of alcohol and my mother’s microscope and visits to the library. It was very much entrenched in that, and research papers being published. But Rebound mending was still very much a way of life; it was quite ingrained. I think, for me, very much into the DNA of the Indian way of life, which meant that there is a huge amount of respect for materials, for resources, and being frugal is part of it, but also there’s something more to it. My mother inculcated this deep respect for food, for clothing, for resources. My brother and I were not allowed to just chuck anything away. Not only that, but I saw it all around me. The default is to mend, and it’s to repair rather than throw away.

For instance, like your bag broke, for example. You could go down to the neighbourhood cobbler and get it fixed. Or if your heel came off, you could do that, and the life was PASSARI; for instance, it would start from being worn multiple times, and then, it became too fragile, clothes would be made out of it. When the clothes fell apart, then strips of fabrics that could be salvaged were gathered and turned into quilts. When the quilts fell apart, they became dishcloths and dusters, and still, one day, it’s just fibres left, and then it is allowed to return to the earth. That way of life was very much all I saw. It was only when I came to the UK when I heard things like slow cooking or seasonal eating I discovered it’s a thing. That’s how I lived my life. I have often felt and reflected that there seems to be a disconnect there these sorts of wisdom. This way of life was everywhere. We were all living this way of life until something happened. My understanding is it was the industrial revolution happened, and then suddenly, there was a big disconnect between traditional wisdom that was handed down generations and then something that was taught to you as being the new and the cool and therefore, we had to adopt that.

 

Katie

If you don’t mind me asking this question, and tell me if you do, but if your parents were both academics, it doesn’t sound like you were a poor family. It sounds like you had resources. This culture of mending wasn’t coming from a lack of alternatives. Your parents could have chosen to buy new things. What was driving that culture of mending in that case?

 

Ekta

I think it was very much a connection to the land. It was very much a connection to the resources. For instance, the food that we ate and my parents always emphasized the fact how it came from the land. My ancestors were farmers, so my Dad would always say somebody has worked really hard in the field for this. There was this notion of respecting the food and respecting the land and somebody’s labour that has gone into it rather than tossing it in the bin. The leftovers, for instance; my mum would, the next day, invent something. I often think, could it be like this idea of the circularity of life and rebirth, which is so familiar and entrenched in India? Could it be that it’s manifesting into this culture of recycling as well? You’re almost creating new avatars of the same thing, but the expression is different. Also, recycling is incentivized, hugely incentivized in India. So, for example, there’s like a whole economy that exists around the idea of recycling. Your old newspapers and magazines, somebody like the Radi Baha, as they’re called, like the newspaper collector, would come and buy them from you. When I came here in the west, it’s like, I have to pay money to my council to take that off my hands? Those old newspapers that were bought from you India are then converted into newspaper bags or in small grocery shops when you go. You would be given all your goods in a small bag that has been made using old newspapers. So, there’s that economy that exists already. Every winter, for example, you wouldn’t go and buy new quilts; you would just send them to your local quilt maker, who would take out all the wadding and give them a good beating. So the air was re-introduced into it, and then they would come back looking pristine. They would restitch them back, also. At the start of winter, you would see these beautiful quilts laid out on the side of the street, just drying and soaking in the sun and getting ready for people to use them for the next season.

 

Katie

I love the idea of kind of soaking in all the sun from the summer and then using them to keep you warm in the winter.

 

Ekta

Yes. Also, like, this whole idea of undoing and redoing. So, all the stitches were taken apart, and often when I would see these artisans just working, they would save those lengths of threads and rethread  them into the needle and use the same things, so you’re not using a whole new set of threads. You’ve not thrown them away. So that was really, really cool. My mother, apart from being a brilliant scientist, was also a prolific needlewoman. She would knit, and she would sew, and she would embroider. Like you said, they could have easily afforded a new set of jumpers every winter, but they didn’t choose to do that. I remember, my mother would actually, when we outgrew jumpers, and they became small for us, she would unravel them and steam that wool, so it became nice and fluffy and almost new again, and then she would reknit them into patterns that had been loved. She was, I think, the Goddess of Recycle.

 

Katie

Yes.

 

Ekta

All of this tacit learning was happening when I was growing up, and you don’t even question it. You think this is a way of life. But having left that context and come here to the UK, you start valuing that and reflecting that in new ways. I think that actually mending, as we know it today, has to be an all-pervasive thing. It can’t be just mending our lovely, expensive jumper: it has to be something more than that.

 

Katie

Yes, we need a cultural shift, don’t we, in the west, back towards the idea that repair is just the obvious thing to do for something that’s broken? Tell me about this tacit learning that you mentioned. What did you learn from your mother and your grandmother, and how did that learning take place when it comes to mending and repairing?

 

Ekta

As I mentioned, my mother would constantly be knitting something or embroidering something. At the time, I used to question her sanity, like, how are you finding time to do this? Now, looking back, I think that was her way of accessing another part of her brain. Tactility and comfort, and creativity, and from the rigours of academia, she took time off and used stitching as a way of expressing her own creativity and making some things for her family members for her loved ones. My grandmother, who lived with us until she passed away, was also one of my early influences. She had this huge bag. I still remember it was blue, and she had embroidered some flowers on it. And that bag was her salvage bag. Whenever they were, like, scraps of fabric or things that, as I said, were being recycled or parts of saris that she wanted to save, she would always keep adding them into that bag. When it filled up, when it was nice and round with all of the scraps, she would then start making quilts. In North India, where I grew up, they are called Gudri, but it’s a similar tradition that exists in many, many states in India; they’re called by different names. Sansa is also a similar one, where you’re using the standard fabric and layering them up without wadding between the layers and stitching the layers as a quilt. She used to make those, and I was often a helper. I would help her lay the pieces down, and then she would stitch these multiple pieces and like a patchwork quilt. That, I think, was the early introduction and at the time when your mum is doing something, your thing is so uncool. Eventually, when I began my studies at NID, the National Institute of Design, and I took up a parallel textile design, it came full circle for me. My mother would often just say that “this was something that you didn’t really want to do. And look at you now.” Those Kantha textiles that I saw, my mother’s Kantha saris, and many others that she collected, my Granny’s clothes, there was an early window into what textiles could be. Once I went to design school, it was like a whole world of textiles opened up to me. Suddenly, I learned about textile traditions from India, but also from other cultures like Boro and Japanese textiles, and I was completely seduced by, especially, Japanese textiles. There’s such a wonderful overlap between them, I feel.

 

Katie

You studied at the National Institute of Design in India and then worked in fashion for a number of years. What happened then?

 

Ekta

Well, I think the way that I had understood clothing or appreciated clothing with a richness of story in it, emotion in it, the longevity in it, for instance, my grandmother’s saris were passed on to my mother, which were handed down to me. That longevity that is built into textiles was somehow lacking in this idea of fashion. So when I started working in the industry, I realized that actually there are a number of collections to be produced every so often. It was crazy amounts of just churning out newer, ever newer clothes. Somehow, I felt there was such a disconnect between how I had grown up understanding clothes to how I was being asked to function within the fashion industry. Although working in India, there was this wonderful thing of being able to work with artisans and craft clusters and carrying forward these wonderful traditions that have existed for thousands of years, but yet I felt that it wasn’t my calling. I was drawn more to textiles and was drawn more to the idea of storytelling and how I could really make that my central focus rather than producing ever more silhouettes and ever more clothes. I took a step away from that, and I think that was the best decision I ever made.

So I came to the UK to do a Masters in Textiles, and it was really here that I was able to explore all the ideas that I had been thinking about. In fact, in my MA, I explored the beauty of damage and decay in textiles. I did lots of rough dyeing and deconstructing textiles and putting them back together again. At the time, I didn’t know what I was doing was repair, in a sense, but upon reflection, you feel that, oh, I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what I was after, but I think that was a very important idea that I was pursuing at the time.

 

Katie

It’s interesting how many of the people I have interviewed about repair are actually fascinated by damage. It reminds me of something that Brené Brown says, and I’m a big fan of Brené Brown’s.

 

Ekta

Yes, me too.

 

Katie

When she asks people about love, they tell her about heartbreak. When she asks people about connection, they tell her about loneliness. It’s just occurring to me now that I’m asking all these people about repair, and we keep ending up talking about damage, which in some ways is really obvious. In other ways, I think is kind of you imagine that repair is there to fix the damage, whereas actually, in some ways, it’s in dialogue with the damage. And that’s a slightly different thing.

 

Ekta

Yes, I agree with you. It’s also acknowledging what has broken down or what is disappearing and then trying to: also this idea of beauty that happens when metal gains a certain patina. I’m fascinated with that. All my rust-dying experiments to Miami was just about that. But yes, I agree with you. Certainly, a dialogue rather than this idea of fixing.

 

Katie

Yes, that’s really interesting. You mentioned Kantha very briefly and excitingly. You have a book about Kantha coming out in Spring, Summer 2023. We’ve got a little while to wait for that one. First, maybe just explain more about what Kantha is for anybody who’s not familiar with that term; you’ve touched on it a little bit, but just to make sure everybody’s clear and then tell us about the book and tell us about why Kantha is something that you’re so drawn to?

 

Ekta

Okay, so lots of questions in there. So, let’s unpack that. Let’s unpack that slowly. The first is what is Kantha. It’s a quilted textile that is made using discarded layers of fabric which comes from the Bengal region in the Indian subcontinent. What that is, is West Bengal in India, and Bangladesh, which is currently present in Bangladesh, used to be a part of India before Partition. That is the region where this particular technique was practised and still is. And there are references. It goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. What gets me excited about Kantha is a few different elements. The first one is that these textiles are sustainable. It is this idea of taking fabrics that are not in a state to be worn or used but making something new from them, upcycling them, as we today call it, but a green design, which I think only now is becoming part of the mainstream conversation.

What I get so excited about is that these women in rural Bengal have been practising this for hundreds of years, and that is so cool. The second aspect is that this is one of the very few embroidery techniques that was done entirely by women. So, being a feminist, I feel that, yey for women, that this is something that we have done, and we have this language we have created, and it’s a very feminine gait. You’re looking at the world, and you’re telling stories about the world, and you’re talking very much about the things that you care about. So there are two kinds of Kanthas. One is the pictorial, narrative ones, which are called Nakshi Kantha, we are, I suppose, more familiar with. There are those human figures and floral motifs and scenes from daily lives or folktales or religious mythology. All of this is put and embroidered onto the textile.

There is another one, which is more graphic, which is geometric, which a lot of people perhaps don’t associate with Kantha. That’s the one I am really drawn to. So, for me, there are all of these elements, and then the fact that it’s a very simple running stitch, which is a primary stitch that is used in Kantha Textiles. And I love the simplicity of it. I love the fact that with one Stitch, you can have these multiple variations, and then it all, in the end, comes down to a stitch that can be a line. If you just did a single line, or if you did multiple of them, you could have a texture, you could have a pattern, and then with the same Stitch, you could actually stitch three or four or five layers of textiles, and it starts to become a quilt, and it starts to become a sculpture, almost.

 

Katie

Almost the stitches give it that three-dimensionality, don’t they? They’re often pulled a little bit tight.

 

Ekta

Yes.

 

Katie

You get these bobbles that trap air, and bobbles is the wrong word.

 

Ekta

Bumps. Ridges.

 

Katie

Ridges. That’s the word.

 

Ekta

It’s very characteristic of Kantha textiles to have those lovely textured ridges through it. Normally we understand embroidery as something of an embellishment, so it’s something that you added on to a preexisting fabric or cloth. I get really excited with Kantha that this is one of the few stitches that can actually; it’s changing the structure of the fabric, making it more sculptural, it’s making it more tactile, almost. You look at it, and you almost feel drawn into stroking it.

 

Katie

I’m making it warmer. Right, because it’s catching air in the gaps.

 

Ekta

In the layers. Yes. Kantha were traditionally made as gifts of love, and they were passed on as markers of rites of passage. A new baby born in the house or a daughter being married off would be given this, but also as a way of almost telling your story. Women chose to embroider wishes or blessings in those Kanthas, and they were meant to be functional objects. Something like a wrapping for, say, religious books or for keeping your jewellery. Or they were seat covers, or rather, they were placed on the floor for honoured guests to sit on. But even as decorations, I feel that it spans the entire gamut of what a textile could be: a wrap when a baby is wrapped in it. I also love the idea that, in a sense, it’s your connection to different generations. If a grandmother’s sari is being used to make a Kantha for the grandchild, how symbolic is that? The baby is literally being wrapped in granny’s love. I love the emotional aspect of textiles as well.

 

Katie

Yes, that’s really beautiful. I think repairing something is an act of love, isn’t it? That’s something that’s come up quite a lot with the people I’ve interviewed across the podcast. It’s an act of care for that object? Of course. It’s often an act of love for the person that object belongs to. I think that’s a really beautiful part of repair.

 

Ekta

Also, I feel that it is also an act of emotional repair. I think sewing is so much related to catharsis and this idea of emotional repair. For me, particularly within my own practice, this is something that I have come to realize, and I’m reflecting more and more on this, that when I am working with Stitch, I am instantly connected to my mother, and I’m instantly connected to my grandmother. Although they are not here in this world, it just feels that I’m honouring their presence of what they handed down to me.

 

Katie

I think because craft is hand knowledge, isn’t it? Of course, you can learn it from a book or from watching YouTube videos or whatever. But there’s something about the passing of skill from one set of hands to another that, as you say because you’ve watched your grandmother’s hands work, you’ve watched your mother’s hands work, they’ve no doubt corrected you and touched your hands in the passing on of those skills. Their skills are in your hands, aren’t they? Which is a really lovely way to think about it.

 

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Katie

Now, you mentioned how the women who would have done Kantha, over the years, would have embroidered their stories and their wishes into those pieces. That’s something you do in your work in a slightly different way. Maps show up a lot, particularly in your artwork. I’d love you to talk to us a little bit more about why maps are such an interesting device, and perhaps, particularly, you could tell us about your Portraits of Place project.

 

Ekta

Yes, I’d love to. Well, maps are such fascinating objects, not simply because of what they look like. I mean, they’re beautiful in their own right, just as a graphic object, but also so beautiful because of the stories they can tell. I was drawn to them, to map making, for these two reasons. Because it allowed me to tell stories of place, of belonging, of history, of identities so easily and in such a lovely way. These maps became portals to different places, not just physical locations, but also almost lives, stories of lives. I began making maps in 2010, I think it was, and it grew from a very personal place for me. My mum, at the time, was quite ill, so I was kind of flying between London and Delhi very often and really questioning what was home, what is home to me, and how do I define this idea of home.

Somewhere in that year, I started making these maps; one of London and one of Delhi, which is where my parents were living at the time. And making Delhi was so easy, right? I had these multiple memories that I could access easily. Even when I was drawing the maps and then embroidering the Delhi map, it was like I was reliving all of those, which was beautiful. So when it came to doing the map of London, I initially thought, well, there’s not a lot there. I haven’t lived a significant part of my life in this city, and it’s only recently that I had started my life in London. Maybe it had been like a couple of years since moving or not even in that, but I found that through this idea, through this act of making and drawing, I could claim the city as my own. I actually discovered that I had the places that very much were mine. Like, for example, my studio, or where I was teaching or where my friends lived or where I lived. This city, which I thought was kind of a recent acquaintance, became very much where I felt at home. That was the starting of the journey with maps, and it has continued for the last decade, more than a decade now. So much so that, slowly, all the other elements have petered out, and it’s just become the main focus. The second part of your question was the Portrait of Place, which is a fabulous commission from a local museum in West London, called Gunnersbury Park Museum. The commission was to celebrate the local community and the local area that the museum serves and really make a piece to commemorate that.

The obvious response to me was to create a map. We worked with it as a public participatory project, and we worked with two different community groups, one in Ealing and one in Hounslow and these fantastic groups of women. One group was women who were deaf and hard of hearing. The other group was an intergenerational group where people who were school-going kids to those who had retired. There was this wonderful confluence of community members and hands that came together to make this piece. I asked people to choose locations that they thought were important and represented this area. Each of those was embroidered by a community member and myself. The map now hangs in the permanent collection of the museum. And I also embroidered everybody’s names; whoever took part, even if they came for a day or they came for the entirety of the project, so that everyone can draw a sense of ownership from it, like that their hands and their work has been celebrated. It’s now part of a museum collection. That project just gave me so much joy.

Every year I make it a point to work on community-led projects because I really believe that art should not be elitist. It should be for everyone, as much for the next person as somebody who’s a regular gallery visitor and a collector of art. So, I try and balance it with my commissions for collectors with community-led projects. I think that brings me a lot of joy to be able to do that.

 

Katie

There’s something you’ve just made me think of. I think the first time we met was when you invited me to, I can’t remember the details, but I remember sitting with a group of women and were all embroidering onto the same piece of fabric. It was just such a wonderful experience to feel part of this collective creation. Remind me the details of that event, because that was wonderful.

 

Ekta

Well done for remembering that, because that was a few years ago. It was at Made London, which is a contemporary craft fair.

 

Katie

That was it.

 

Ekta

In central London. I was really playing with this idea of how we can create events, or rather gatherings of people, where we all come together and make something together, even if it is just adding a few stitches; it doesn’t matter. It’s just holding space for those conversations that happen, sitting next to someone you’ve never met—this idea of imbuing our energies, our love of making into a single piece. Like you, I invited several others, and it was so lovely. It has been such a fulfilling part of projects that I have done. I love this act of collective making, which I think was very much part of cultures across the world because that connection is broken, and I think we need to bring it back. Whether it is doing more of such events or doing connective community arts projects, somehow, we have to reignite that.

 

Katie

Absolutely. I can remember I’d been haring around London. I live in Cornwall, so I would have been trying to cram a month’s worth of meetings into two days, no doubt. I can just remember arriving, being so stressed. My pulse was racing; I was kind of hyper. And an hour later, I felt as calm as I’d felt in months. It was transformative. Actually, I haven’t stopped sewing since, so thank you for that. But you’ve been running, what you call, Soothing Stitch workshops during lockdown, a couple of which I’ve been lucky enough to take part in. What role do you think that mending and repair can play in looking after our mental health and engaging in self-care?

 

Ekta

Firstly, thanks so much for that feedback. That was lovely to hear how you were stressed out, and then you felt really calm and meditative. That is lovely. That is exactly what I would have hoped would happen. Over the years, multiple people have come back to me remembering events such as that, where they felt this amazing connection with material and themselves and with their own flow state. The Soothing Stitch started on a whim during lockdown last year, back in March, when we all went into lockdown, and it suddenly seemed like all connections were broken. I wasn’t able to go to the studio; I wasn’t able to make the work that I would have wanted to make because all my suppliers were closed. I remember that point; within one week of the lockdown being declared, my inbox just filled with cancellations. It was like the entire years’ worth of whatever I had committed to; whether they were exhibitions or teaching commitments or workshops, or speaking invitations, everything was cancelled. Just as a response to that, I said, well, I’m an artist, I still have my hands, I still have my laptop. What can I do with this? Really, it just sprang from that place that I needed to be doing something for the community, for a desire to do some good rather than being kind of defeated by the circumstances. I just put out a note on Instagram asking people to come and join me on a zoom gathering. It really took off from there, and it exploded, really. It became a fixture for Friday evenings, and to me, it was an absolute delight to be able to facilitate that and invite people who had never held a needle. It wasn’t just women; there were men also who joined, and not just from the UK, but from all over the world. So, I continued doing them. They came to an end when the lockdown opened, and then we started them again in January when we went into another lockdown. It felt really empowering to be able to do that. I think it also created a space where people felt welcomed, and they connected with other humans which they may not have been speaking to in real life. We were all locked up in our homes. For me, that idea was so powerful. I think we welcomed over 1000 people over: I know, it’s just, oh, I draw so much joy.

 

Katie

Wow, that’s amazing.

 

Ekta

And from all over the place. From Europe, from North America, from Australia, from India, from Japan. I felt that these threads that have connected us in such a beautiful way. I ended up speaking on BBC Four. I was invited to do that. I was like; you never know where things lead you, right? Recently, since starting these sessions again in the New Year, I asked, I thought if we can create some tangible good other than all of us gathering. So, I, together with all the participants, did a fundraising campaign for the Craft Council Let’s Play campaign. Basically, what that does is, buys craft packs for children in need in England. I thought, what could be more beautiful than being able to help children be creative, especially in this time? And I was amazed. I was bowled over by the generosity of people. Only last week, I had an update from the Craft Council, and we’ve managed to buy 54 packs for children. I thought, there are 54 people, there are 54 young kids whose lives we’ve made a small difference in with Soothing Stitches.

 

Katie

Yes, and passing those skills on to the next generation as well, which is really lovely.

 

Ekta

I know. I’ve had such an amazing response from people, and since having finished the current iteration of them, that I had a flood of private messages and emails saying that what’s happening to this community. We have found a way of bringing everybody back together, so I have recently launched a membership, a way of bringing everyone back together and holding a space for people to be creative and convivial. There is definitely a celebration of connection and community, and creativity going on.

 

Katie

That’s wonderful. How can people find out more about the membership?

 

Ekta

They can go on my website and look under membership and find out more.

 

Katie

Perfect. We’ll make sure that we put the URL in the show notes so people can find that. You mentioned that some of the people who’ve joined these workshops have never picked up a needle before. I know from experience that you have a lovely, gentle, non-judgmental approach to teaching, for which I was very grateful because I don’t think I’d picked up a needle since school. What advice would you give to someone who’s listening at home and perhaps thinking about picking up a needle and thread and doing some mending but lacks confidence in their creative skills?

 

Ekta

Well, the first thing I’d like to say to everyone, whether they have picked up a needle ever or they haven’t, it’s not about perfection. This is the idea that we, somehow, have. It’s the received wisdom right that your stitches need to be perfect, and your handwriting needs to be a certain way. I feel that for me, and this is what I like to teach my students as well, that stitching is about self-expression. It is about finding joy and creativity. It is about finding that space, a meditative space where all your worries begin to melt away, and you’re just focused on the journey that your needle is taking on the cloth. Really, I feel stitching makes meditation so accessible. This idea that sitting down for 20 minutes and listening to an app or focusing on our breathing. I know I do it, and I find it so hard, as do many people, but I feel that the cloth, the intimacy of the cloth, there’s something about that. Just this act of holding a needle and making a very simple line can help us access that state so very easily. Also, it has a tremendous impact on our sense of well-being, this stage of having done something with our hands, which we do less and less of. Other than typing, which is not the best thing for well-being anyway. I think that creative confidence is something that we just have to disregard that idea of perfection. Perfection is so boring! Embrace the idea that it’s like our voice. It’s like nobody else’s, and the way you stitch versus the way I stitch has to be different. I think it goes back to perhaps the Athelears or they were trying to standardise things, that this thing was inculcated, that if one worker left and the next one joined, you should not be able to tell the difference.

But we are not doing that anymore. We really want to celebrate different voices, the diversity of voices and all sorts of different map-making. I think to anyone who’s never picked up the needle before, do it today. It’s companionship. It’s a friendship that you will begin, and it just turns more and more beautiful as you do it.

 

Katie

Yes, absolutely. I love that. You’ve described yourself as having a creative voice which is rooted in the non-binary. I would love you to unpack that a little bit for us.

 

Ekta

Okay, well, I think it really stems from the idea of being comfortable with multiplicity. Growing up in India, this very idea was all-pervasive. It was multiple languages. There are 27 official languages that are spoken in India, and that’s just the official ones. And there are dialects and regional languages. Then, there are clothing, different styles of clothing. There are Gods. I mean, in Hinduism itself, there are more than thousands of gods. I grew up feeling very comfortable with the idea of there being multiple influences and there being multiple voices and going to design school, which was rooted in Bauhaus principles and very much about learning by doing. The tutors that were invited to teach were international. So right from SAMRJ,  a traditional artisan who was practising the trade for generations and working in a very small village in Gujarat, to professors that were teaching at the Royal College of Art or Rhode Island School of Design from all over the world. There was this amazing confluence of different influences that went into the making of what my creative voice is today. Coming and living in the UK, I studied in Scotland, and then I set up my practice in England. I have lived in the Scottish Borders and Edinburgh and Bath, and now London. I feel that I am a product of all of these places. If there was a portrait of me, then all of these places would need to be mentioned and celebrated. Therefore, I feel that I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea of a person being this or that, Eastern or Western or black or white. I just find those stereotypes box people in unnecessarily. At any given time, we have multiple identities, right? I am an artist. I’m a mother. I’m a daughter. I’m a friend. You and I are having this conversation. I feel that we have to honour that and not really define ourselves in these prescribed ways.

 

OUTRO

If you enjoyed this episode, can I ask you to leave a review and, perhaps even hit subscribe? I’ll be honest. I don’t really understand how the algorithm works, but I’m told those two actions really help other people to find the podcast. So that would be amazing. Thank you.

You can find me on Instagram @katietreggiden.1 . You can subscribe to my email newsletter via a link in the show notes. And if you’re a designer/maker, you should really join my free Facebook group, Making design circular. See you there.

This episode was produced by Sasha Huff, so thank you to Sasha, to October Communications for marketing and moral support, to Sugru for their sponsorship, and to you for joining me. You’ve been listening to Circular with Katie Treggiden.