Nidhi Khurana

Residue

2020

Nidhi Khurana’s artistic practice involves creating tapestries with fabric, paper, and at times, silver foil (warakh). Inspired by her background in textiles, Khurana uses the techniques of weaving and stitching to draw from traditional architecture, geographical landmarks, boundaries, and scrap markets. With a strong propensity towards organic materials, Khurana uses them as a medium and incorporates them into her work. In one of her series, she used pomegranate seeds and onion skins to create dyes and stamps instead of paint to imprint detail on the fabric. Her works have a dystopic allusion to them, as she creates maps from sustainable materials. She also makes sculptures with clay, stone, and metal. After dabbling in many forms, she has arrived at ‘cloth’ to cater to her artistic sensibilities. Nidhi Khurana (b. 1980, Allahabad, India) has studied at the Fine Arts department at the M.S University of Baroda and School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi. Her work challenges the very idea of maps, turning cartography on its head. It questions the very visible yet intangible boundaries that a map births, dyeing fabric in the essence of culture, tradition, history, and nature that has indelibly left its impact on each region. She has worked at the ground level, with the locals of the city/town that is her muse at the time. Immersing herself in the place of her choosing, her works are odes to them. “I search for motifs, I excavate; look for stories. I walk the roads, I talk to people and I visit to document all the places on the map”, she says. Speaking about her choice of material, she says “To identify plants for eating/ dyeing/ medicine… I use books. I read about foraged food and books about dyes. I also try to use ayurvedic medicine as much as possible. I have a friend from school who is an ayurvedic doctor. We have found many similarities between food, dyes, and medicine plants. I also use Google lens, an app for the identification of local plants. Since it is not always accurate, I also try to meet and talk to botanists.” She further adds, “Extraction processes are standard and ancient. Heat, water, plant, and fiber create color. Boiling, steaming, and then direct printing is used to create botanical prints or eco-printing as the process is called.” At Disappearing Dialogues, which was held at Delhi’s Bikaner House and hosted by Art Ichol, she taught eco dyeing to the local women of Maihar using indigenous materials like Dahlia, Hibiscus, Marigold, and Palash to make natural dyes for eco prints, bandhani, and shibori. During her artist residency in Braunschweig, Germany of which she was one of the eight scholarship awardees of a year-long fellowship, she created, "100 meters" which ecologically mapped Braunschweig in a towering installation. This was made for the exhibition titled "Every Hundred Feet The World Changes"