CraftCanvas

Mata Ni Pachedi is traditionally used to create portable shrines, cloth temples that could be carried to where the goddess was needed.
For 'In Her Own Time', we asked what happens when the shrine is not for worship but for rest.
The installation is a tunnel. Hand-painted and digitally printed textiles on all sides, drawn from the visual language of Mata Ni Pachedi, the arches, the borders and the hierarchy of the sacred. You walk through it slowly. The passage narrows your pace whether you intend it to or not.
At the end is the sanctum sanctorum. Bolsters on the floor. A large hand-painted Mata Ni Pachedi panel of the goddess by Sanjaybhai Chitara. All ambient temple music and controlled light.
The question the installation asks: who gets to rest? Under what conditions? What does it mean for a woman to claim time that belongs entirely to her?
We think of mothers first as givers. Givers of time, of food, of presence, of self, of everything. Rest, for a woman, is what happens after everyone else is taken care of. If it happens at all.
This installation disagrees. It makes rest the destination, not the remainder.
As shown at Abhivyakti Edition 7, 2025, Ahmedabad. Curated by
Artisan: Sanjaybhai Chitara ( )

28 days from brief to installation.

That is not how craft works. Except this time, it did because the client asked for it.

The brief was simple: something nature-related, and ready in time for their opening.

This is the Sohrai mural we made for Taj Tadoba, in one of India's tiger reserves.

Sohrai is a wall painting tradition from Jharkhand. It is made during the harvest festival when women paint the walls of their homes with images of animals, forests, and the natural world from a grammar that has been passed down without interruption for centuries.

The brief and the tradition were a natural match.

One might argue that twenty-eight days is not enough time to commission craft, at least in the way most people understand commissioning.

What made it possible was the absence of the things that usually slow a project down- the approval chains, the revision loops, and the time it takes for a studio and their client to align.

The architect team made decisions quickly and with confidence. We have a 12 years + working relationship with the architects. So we were aligned right from the word go and we able to bring designs that were ready to approve.

The rest was the artisans.

Adam Christopher Imam. Alka Imam. Diwakar Indwar. Pramila Kiran Lakra. Usha Panna.

Five Sohrai artists who carried a harvest tradition into a wildlife reserve.

Design team: Udit Parekh, Roshni Adarsh
Made in collaboration with (.sairam)

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Gond painting began as songs sung by Gond Pardhans for generations.
From there, they moved to the walls of their homes. It has since travelled, to canvas, to paper, to ceramic, to fabric, to the walls of hotels and offices and cultural institutions across the country. Every time it moves to a new surface, it reveals something new about itself.
This time it is on light.
A lighting installation for an office, currently in progress in our studio. The Gond motifs with the characteristic layered lines, the fish, the birds, the trees rendered in the visual logic of the Gondi worldview will sit on a surface that glows from behind.
The light changes what the eye does with the image. In natural light, you read the pattern. In the installation's own light, maybe the pattern reads you.
This is what we mean when we say Gond travels.
It is not a decorative tradition that can be applied to surfaces. It is a visual language complete enough to find meaning on any surface it encounters, be it mud wall, paper, canvas, light.
Put it anywhere. It will make sense.
Team: , ,

The Andhari river runs through Tadoba National Park.
It is the lifeline of the forest, the tigers come to it, deer come to it, the crocodiles and the star turtles that swim in it, every creature in the park orients around it. We made it the spine of this mural.
I hope everyone who stands here hears the sound of the river.
Made in collaboration with ,
Artisans: ,
Design team: , ,
Made for Taj Tadoba Resort & Soa, Nagpur.

Vummidi Bangaru Chetty is one of the oldest jewellery houses in India.
Growing up in Chennai, I had peered into the store every time I passed it. I never had the courage to step inside that kind of grandeur. The diamond jewellery in the display seemed like something made for goddesses.
Turns out, it was.
The brief was a divine wedding scene. The client wanted the sacred and the celebratory together. In the Indian context, this is not a contradiction, it is the definition of a wedding.
Tanjore painting was the first instinct. But Tanjore, for all its devotional richness, is a single-figure tradition. We needed a composition, a full scene with movement, narrative, multiple figures in relationship with each other. Pattachitra offered that. A sacred narrative tradition from Odisha, used for centuries to tell the stories of gods on cloth and palm leaf with extraordinary density and precision.
We took our references from literature on the Chozha dynasty, including my favorite Ponniyin Selvan, which I used this project as an excuse to re-read.
The panels were hand-illustrated by in Pattachitra style. The goddesses and divine figures sit behind the jewellery displays, not just as backdrop but also as context. In a store where jewellery has always been made for weddings, for temples, for rites of passage, the art and the product are making the same argument.
That what is offered here is not merely beautiful. It is significant.
And when you wear this jewellery on your wedding day, may you have the divine blessings and the everlasting love that our art signifies.
Made in collaboration with for