Ekta Aggarwal

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

Growing up in a middle class family in the 80's in India, I saw my mother, grandmother and aunts spend their free time embroidering, knitting, crocheting, and working with textiles to make clothes, quilts, bedspreads, handkerchiefs, items of household decoration that we used in our daily lives and also gifts that would be given at the birth of a child and as part of dowry at the time of marriage of a female family member. I have absorbed this relationship with textiles and my work is a manifestation of it. In 2014, I started a design project where I worked with craftswomen to make earth friendly bags using handmade fabrics in India. As the design project evolved, I became conscious of the amount of scrap fabric that was being generated in my studio. I started collecting all the scrap fabric with the intention of upcycling it into designs for the bags. In 2017, while I was studying at California Institute of the Arts, I took the PostColonial Critique class. The readings for this class made me conscious of my postcolonial identity. I became aware of my distance from Indian literature and culture as my entire education had been in schools where the medium of instruction was English. I noticed that I easily moved between two worlds- my hindi speaking Indian family and my english speaking colleagues of the western world. This inspired me to shift the materials of my work in order to claim my identity. I replaced canvas with Khadi as the base of my paintings. Khadi, a simple...

Artwork