Rather than allowing discarded materials to end up in a landfill, I see them as holding potential for transformation. This ecological awareness is not separate from my work with people. The act of reusing becomes an act of care, and making together becomes a way of rethinking our relationship to materials, to each other, and to the environments we inhabit.
In my recent work, Piece of Me, I use a found bamboo fence and subvert a structure typically designed to separate and contain spaces. I transform it into something connective, a site of gathering, shaped through participation. The bamboo fence is suspended using nylon wire, allowing for the height of the work to be adjusted.
Piece of Me is an ongoing project that began in 2008, when I first started collecting fabric off-cuts and assembling them into what I thought of as mini saris. Each textile piece is cut, ironed and fixed into a rectangular form. What started as a playful impulse became an act of repetition, care, and quiet archiving. Over time, more than 300 pieces have accumulated, each one a fragment of discarded textile, each with its own colour, history, and emotional charge. Together they form a growing record of materials that might otherwise have been forgotten.
At the heart of Piece of Me is participation. I hand over a level of ownership to the audience: an invitation to hold the fabrics, to feel the texture, connect to their individuality, and to choose where to place a piece on the installation’s fencing structure. Their gestures, small but intentional, are woven into the work. Every contribution alters the composition, making the piece a living, shifting installation shaped through collective presence. The work also carries the weight of postcolonial histories embedded within cloth: who makes, who discards, who labours, who takes. By engaging physically with the fabrics, participants are asked to consider what a “piece” signifies, what it means to take, to give, and to leave a trace. Piece of Me grows through shared making. It becomes a space where personal memory, material storytelling, and communal action meet.
I am submitting this work with the hope that social engagement is welcome in this way. The interactive installation is where sculpture becomes something you can shape and explore. The form grows and changes over time, movement is part of the work, and no textile piece is fixed where it is placed, and visitors can change, overlap and collaborate with others to see what happens. This installation is intended to tour different places and spaces. Piece of Me has been selected for the New Art Exchange exhibition in May 2026, and I would like to see it make its way to Venice after. I am continually constructing more textile pieces to add to the installation.
