Weaving traps

‘I kept weaving….

To hide

I kept weaving….

To drown

I kept weaving….

Till it trapped me

I kept weaving….

Until I could not weave anymore’

The act of weaving is both transcendental as one looses oneself to create something almost organically and a metaphor to understand the world itself.

How the interwoven threads form a pattern, which changes their very form making the threads become a fabric.

The works in this project are derived from the idea of confinement and traps that social beings tend to weave around themselves and get imprisoned in, due to thinking within their social, cultural and political structures.

The uncomfortable restrictive spaces, notions, boundaries that we are victims of, due to our conditioning, greed and need for power and security and the emptiness it leaves us with.

The crocheted wire work ‘Trap’ is a never-ending project, woven stitch by stitch to symbolize the beautiful traps we weave around ourselves thinking of power, protection and security.

The metal thread becomes an element, which defines these boundaries. It marks a territory defining emptiness, whether it is sewed on canvas as a mesh or crocheted into this enormous sculptural trap giving emptiness a lucid physical form along with it becoming a shield between the inside and the outside space.

I have also been involved with common everyday tools in my art practice –

As our daily lives are interwoven around them.

Bending, enlarging, twisting them and translating them in wood, as symbols of functionality, from personal, political or societal standpoints, they remain constantly challenged, twisted, distorted or broken.

I have often confronted the idea of the ‘self’ as a tool which functions and is rendered dysfunctional or is compromised due to circumstances, pressures, self-doubts and societal conditioning which are almost woven and stitched into our fabric.

Enlarged, Distorted and compromised objects speak of an altering intervention, silent violence, helplessness and surrender.

The burdens or baggage we carry within, endure, measure and define, time and again. The forced thinking within boundaries is my area of inquiry and challenge as they change and distort us forever.

I engage with these objects in my drawings, sculptures and Paintings along with speaking the language of threads, which are stitched on to the surface or the skin or woven freely into a large lucid free flowing structure.

-Shivani Aggarwal