As a Pakistani artist-mother living by myself for a year as I waited for a visa to join my husband in the US, I had to evolve my practice into something that I can carry with me while I take my toddler to the park, work in snatches while she sleeps, or in between loads of laundry. Searching for a pragmatic solution to keep at my ongoing experimentation with cyanotypes led me to translate my imagery directly on cloth. Fabric as a medium allowed me to forge my everyday life and my creative life into one – it is soft, malleable, light and portable; mistakes, tears, stains and holes can be fixed and mended with just some thread and a needle. In the all-prevalent tedium of domestic life, it made sense to be inspired by the ubiquitous, embellished pieces of utilitarian cloth surrounding me always in Pakistan – screen printed roti rumaals (bread-wrapping napkins), pattern-woven indigenous khes (blankets), and our all-purpose dupattas (scarves) in multitudes of prints. These found objects – with their kitschy popular imagery and bold colors – along with the traditionally “feminine craft” of stitching, embroidering, quilting and mending made for a perfect conversation with my cyanotypes.  The resulting fabric collages are a collision of organic and inorganic elements within our built environments, as well as a fitting metaphor for the repairing of the two disjointed beings within me trying to navigate motherhood and being an artist, with the gentleness of vines wrapping themselves around barbed wire – still growing through adversity.

• Heirloom Convoy