The Bones of the Cotton Weavers are Bleaching the Plains
Gouache, ink, gold leaf on illustration board
20x28cm (2023)
When I moved to the North of England, I felt an unexpected pull toward the physical presence of place. The mills and vast industrial buildings stood with quiet authority. Their brick facades and towering windows appeared dignified, almost majestic. Yet beneath their beauty lay a more complex history.
I was born in Lahore, a city also shaped by empire. Living in the North, I began to sense a dialogue between these two geographies. The industrial wealth that transformed Northern England was deeply connected to colonial systems that reorganised land, labour and resources across South Asia. Cotton and textiles formed invisible threads between these distant places long before I physically moved between them.
This realisation also awakened a deeper ecological awareness in my practice. I began to think about how landscapes carry the traces of industry, trade and environmental change. The mills stand as monuments to labour and innovation, yet they are also part of a global history that connected soil, fibre, water and human lives across continents.
My research led me to examine how colonial governance reshaped agriculture and trade in South Asia, redirecting cultivation and weakening local textile traditions. Industrial prosperity in Britain and precarity in colonised regions were not separate stories but intertwined structures within the same historical system.
This work forms part of an ongoing strand in my practice that explores the entanglement of environment, history and identity. The North of England and Lahore appear as connected landscapes, held within the same historical fabric. If these places are bound by a shared past of industry and extraction, how might they also be reimagined through care, responsibility and renewed relationships with land?
Unfinished Thread
Gouache on illustration board
20x30cm (2023)
This painting reflects on the disruption of textile traditions during British rule in India. Skilled artisans and weavers who once produced intricate fabrics were increasingly restricted, compelled to supply raw materials rather than finished work, as industrial production in Britain expanded. Local craft economies were destabilised and, in many cases, violently suppressed.
The hands in the composition reference embroidery and miniature traditions passed down through generations. Suspended in space, they appear both active and constrained. The delicate threads arc between them, suggesting continuity of knowledge, yet their tension also evokes rupture.
Gold fragments scatter across the surface, recalling value, trade and imperial wealth. The turquoise ground holds a quiet stillness, contrasting with the historical violence embedded within the narrative. The thread, tinged with red, becomes both line and wound, marking the body with the consequences of enforced economic control.
The work asks what happens to inherited skill when it is deliberately interrupted. When craft is silenced, does the hand forget, or does it continue to remember?
An Act of Generosity
20x30cm
ink, gouache and gold leaf on board
2023
This painting draws from a photograph depicting a moment of charity. In the original image, British officials stand upright while local Indian subjects sit on the ground receiving food. The staged composition of the photograph reflects a carefully constructed narrative of benevolence and authority.
By translating this archival reference into silhouette, I reframe the image through a contemporary lens. The verticality of the standing figures contrasts with the grounded seated bodies, making visible the hierarchy embedded within the act itself. What appears as generosity is inseparable from structures of power.
Gold operates as a symbolic surface of empire, referencing wealth, value and monumentality. Yet it drips and fragments, suggesting instability beneath the polished narrative. The red ground intensifies the scene, holding tension between dignity, vulnerability and control.
Through reduction, compression and layered surface, the painting questions how histories were visually staged and asks what remains unspoken beneath gestures of charity.