Native Wool Research (ongoing)

My research explores the ecology, materiality, and cultural histories of native Indian wool a fibre often dismissed as rough, low-value, or unusable by the textile industry. Through field visits, experiments, and collaborations with pastoral communities across the Deccan, Kutch, and Himalayan regions, I am tracing how this fibre carries memory, labour, and belonging.

I work with black and white native wool sourced directly from shepherding communities, dyeing it with natural pigments from plants, minerals, and food waste. The process is slow, tactile, and deeply local a form of listening to the land and its people.

This ongoing inquiry looks at wool as both an ecological and political material one shaped by histories of colonial extraction, industrial standardisation, and the erasure of indigenous craft knowledge. By transforming discarded fibres into sculptural, felted forms, I seek to imagine new mythologies of care, resilience, and repair.