There’s something innately homely about grandmothers: an ease, almost like time being held gently into an embrace. At the 17th edition of India Art Fair, Porgai Artisans Association presented Threads of Home, a body of work that felt like a showcase doused in memory and legacy. Based in Sittilingi, Tamil Nadu, Porgai is a collective of over 70 Lambadi women artisans who hand-process traditional embroidery motifs rooted in their community’s ethos. Incubated in 2023 through the At Home Artist Residency led by designer Anshu Arora, and creatively steered by Sindhu Kamaraj, a NIFT graduate and the first artisan’s child from the community to attend design school, the collection maps the Lambadi people’s nomadic histories and the socioeconomic, environmental and political shifts that reshaped them.
At its core is The Founding Mothers’ Collection: The Song of Gammi and The Song of Neela, a tender tribute to Sindhu’s grandmothers, Gammi patti and Neela patti. If Gammi is memory, Neela is momentum. One reminds us that craft is how these women archive their lives for those who know how to look. The other is intimate and anecdotal, honouring a teacher who didn’t merely revive a tradition, but ensured it stayed alive and responsive. Seasonal rhythms unfold through the work: summer settling into jaali stitches and quilted ‘biscuits’, capturing heat, rest and waiting: monsoon charted through nature’s tempers in the Sittilingi valley.
The collection’s mainstay is Porgai’s first soft sculpture, Re-Membered. Shaped like a kachili and tattooed with scenes of everyday life, weighed by thread and memory, it speaks of women who chose to stay, to work, to be seen.
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