Hand Embroidery as Testimony: The Art, Data, and Politics Behind My Work

I want to talk about the red thread. Not what it looks like (though I hope that is impossible to forget once you have seen it), but why is it there at all, and why it had to be made by hand.

When people first encounter the embroidered cyanotypes in this body of work, the assumption is usually that the stitching is decorative, or that it is a reference to women's domestic labour. Both readings are understandable and neither is entirely wrong. But neither is the whole story.

The Argument Between Red Thread and Cyanotype Blue

If you have read my earlier piece on The Weight of Blue, you will already know that the choice of cyanotype in this work is not an aesthetic accident. Blue, as I explored there, carries centuries of encoded authority, it is divine, colonial, commercial. The cyanotype process renders everything within it subject to that same flattening blue field.

The red thread enters that field as a disruption. Where blue absorbs and controls, red insists. It will not be contained by the image. It bleeds across edges, hangs loose. It refuses the neat boundaries that the cyanotype's cool authority tries to impose. The two colours are not decorative contrast. They are arguments.

The Gendered Politics of Craft and Labor in India

Growing up in India, embroidery was simply part of what girls learned. Not because anyone sat you down and said: this is your place. It was quieter than that. Cooking, stitching, caretaking — these were woven into daily life so naturally that the discrimination embedded in them rarely felt like discrimination at all. That is precisely how the most effective systems of control work. They do not announce themselves.

In The Weight of Blue, I wrote about how blue functions similarly, as a colour so naturalised into structures of authority that we have stopped noticing it is doing anything at all. The embroidery works the same way. It arrives looking familiar, domestic, harmless. And then you look more carefully.

An irony I often think about is that while Indian girls learn embroidery for the home, the commercial trade is a male-dominated profession. It is these men ‘the karigaars’ who produce the intricate textiles that India is famous for worldwide. Ultimately, patriarchal systems deny women a paid career in the very skills they are expected to practise for free. 

Beyond the Statistics: Pushing Against Gender Data Bias

But this history, as relevant as it is, was not what made me commit to embroidery for this project. What convinced me was something more physical than symbolic. It was the act itself.

The repetitive, slow motion of pushing a needle through paper. The irreversibility of each mark. The fact that once a stitch is made, it cannot be undone without leaving a trace. That felt true to what I was trying to say.

The Lancet reports that for every 1,000 children born in India, 71 female foetuses are lost to sex-selective abortion. That number is real. It is rigorously documented. And it changes almost nothing in the minds of most people who encounter it, because data, by its nature, allows detachment. You read a statistic, you feel briefly uncomfortable, and you move on.

Caroline Criado Perez makes a related argument in her work on data bias that data only ever collects what institutions choose to measure, which means it already carries the blind spots of the systems that produced it. But even when the data is accurate and damning, it struggles to do what art can do: force an emotional encounter that the viewer cannot simply file away.

The hand-stitch refuses the logic of the aggregate. A statistic turns 71 lives into a fraction. A hand-made stitch insists on its own individual, unrepeatable texture. Each one took time. Each one is slightly different. Each one is, in its small way, a refusal.

The red thread is also not gentle. It is tangled, knotted, deliberately allowed to hang loose and bleed across the image. I was not interested in “beautiful craft”. I wanted something that looked like what it is; bloodlines, discarded lifelines, the mess that gets hidden beneath the clean language of policy and data. If blue, as I argued in The Weight of Blue, is the colour that cloaks what is missing while insisting on its own authority, then the red thread is what that authority has been doing all along, made visible and undeniable.

Reclaiming the Shivalinga: Brahmanical Patriarchy and the Sacred

The 71 cyanotypes are arranged in the form of a Shivalinga, a symbol that in its original theological understanding represents the inseparable union of masculine and feminine energies. Not dominance. Balance. What centuries of Brahmanical patriarchy have done to that symbol is part of the argument.

Uma Chakravarti's scholarship on Brahmanical patriarchy shows how the control of women's bodies, their reproductive capacity, their movement, their choices, all became foundational to maintaining caste hierarchy and patrilineal inheritance. The girl child coded as an economic burden, dowry banned in law but thriving in practice under other names: Roka, Tika, Shagun, Milni, Maan, Bhat.

The sacred form of the Shivalinga inhabited by the spectral presence of those 71 lives is not decoration. It is mourning held in the same breath. And it is held, crucially, in blue - the colour that has always known how to make absence look like order.

Making the Emotional Connection Visible

I am not claiming this work solves anything. Governments, activists, and NGOs have done vital work through policy and legal reform that this project does not compete with or replace. But I have kept returning to a question I cannot shake: if the data is inaccessible or incomprehensible to the very people most affected by what it describes, who does it actually serve?

The stitching is my answer to that question. Not a complete answer. But an honest one.

If you haven't read  The Weight of Blue yet, I would suggest starting there. It sets out the thinking behind the cyanotype process and the role of blue across this entire body of work. The two texts are in conversation with each other, and reading them together will give you a fuller picture of what 'A Cry Still Unheard' is trying to do and why.