All tagged creativity

A Handwoven Textile Narrates a Karenni Refugee Woman’s Journeys to Resettlement in Massachusetts

A Handwoven Textile Narrates a Karenni Refugee Woman’s Journeys to Resettlement in Massachusetts

Susan Rodgers
Articles

Artisans in resettling refugee communities in Worcester, Massachusetts sometimes use their craft-making as a means of solace in the face of troubling memories.  In this essay I contend that some other refugee artisans use the making of hand loomed textiles as a coded archive of the many borders they have crossed and losses they have experienced, fleeing extreme violence.  One such textile is a dark orangish pink table runner woven in 2022 for sale by the nonprofit, Refugee Artisans of Worcester, or RAW.  The weaver is the Karenni artisan Tu Meh, age about 62.  I employ historian Tiya Miles’ historiography of another specific cloth object, a cotton sack, as set out in her All that She Carried (2022) and apply that approach to cloths made along the refugee journey.

Decoding Women's Narratives of Gender and Creativity in 19th-20th century Beadwork of Saurashtra

Decoding Women's Narratives of Gender and Creativity in 19th-20th century Beadwork of Saurashtra

Medha Bhatt
Articles

During the 19th-20th century, Kathi women in Saurashtra, Gujarat used glass beads to create trousseau textiles, generating the unique tradition of beadwork.  As a researcher trained in textile design and belonging to the Kathi community, I use my great-grandmother, Jadiba's beaded bag, inherited as part of my trousseau, as an entry point into her mind, creativity and use of mathematics at the turn of the last century. By exploring her story as well as those of two other women beadwork artists and analysing beadworks, I make a case for folk or vernacular knowledge and creativity embodied in the object.

Of Kiwi Fruit and Kewpie Dolls: The Wonder of Modern Alankara in Bangalore

Of Kiwi Fruit and Kewpie Dolls: The Wonder of Modern Alankara in Bangalore

Tulasi Srinivas
Photo Essays

The daily aesthetic ornamentation of the deity known as alaṅkāra is an everyday feature of temple ritual. This colorful ornamentation, traditionally of flower garlands and fruit offerings, is synchronized to daily and festival calendars, with spectacular alaṅkāra offered during festivals. Alaṅkāra offers the temple priests scope for creativity, yet it is carefully controlled and codified according to liturgical texts, for it is thought to how God is revealed. Speaking to new practices of alaṅkāra in temples in Bangalore through the usage of new materials such as Kiwi fruit and Kewpie dolls the author suggest a new understanding of modernity and Hindu aesthetics, not only expanding devotees’ understandings of divinity, but inviting devotees to feel adbhutha or wonder.