Bagh Phulkari: Bird Song

In my memory, my paternal aunt was the one who introduced us to much of our personal oral history about our village and the way women lived. This work is a tribute to that inheritance.

Seema Kohli, 2019 — The artworks in this series draw from the textile traditions of Punjab and the oral histories of women passed down through generations.

Bagh Phulkari: Bird Song, Embroidery and mixed media on silk, 2019

In my memory, my paternal aunt or bua, was the one who introduced us to a lot of our own personal oral history about our village and the way women lived. She stepped into a maternal role at the age of twelve, after her mother’s death, raising her five younger siblings. I always perceived her as significantly older; it was much later that I discovered that she was merely 8 years older than my father. She was a child herself when she took over the role of their mother.

Bagh Phulkari — the garden embroidery — was the language through which generations of Punjabi women encoded their stories, their griefs, and their joys. Each thread pulled through cloth was an act of memory, a way of stitching together the fragments of lives lived quietly, powerfully, largely unrecorded.

This series draws on that tradition of textile as archive, translating the patterns and rhythms of phulkari into print, honouring the women who carried entire worlds within their hands.