Abstract
While natural disasters in the past, along with the recent COVID-19 pandemic, have disrupted livelihoods, they have also activated the structuring of handicraft as an age-old remedial practice with curative properties. Further, the need for communicating textile processes, in support of slow fashion have allowed educational institutions to contextualise this teaching with the help of pedagogical models that define the role of both craft education and craft-based research. As an educator at Pearl Academy, India, what I can observe in the modern world today, is that there is always a cross-cultural contact between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, and that the much-discussed ‘global village’ is no longer a fantasy, but a fact, despite numerous paradoxes. This paper offers insight on my perspectives and experiences that shed light on the plight of handicraft in the most hand-skilled country in the world. It also lends a bird’s eye point of view on the need to break barriers between modern and traditional, between the urban and rural etc. and looks at the many avatars of handicraft and techniques being repurposed for modern applications such as luxury fashion, interior design and jewellery. The paper takes into consideration, hand crafted textile samples developed by three postgraduate fashion design students at Pearl Academy, India, who have developed textile samples, as part of their project called ‘Hybrid Textiles’. The samples create an epilogue to the context of this study through an ‘end of life’ narrative and craft practices in India.
Presenters
Rishab ManochaAssociate Professor, School of Fashion and Textiles, Pearl Academy, Rajasthan, India
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Handicraft, Textile, Sustainability, Indian Folk-art, Hand-skill
