Reimagined Angavastram

Limited Edition of Six

This body of work extends my ongoing cyanotype practice into the field of the body, transforming the photographic surface into a draped, wearable plane. The works are not garments in a fashion sense; they are textile images activated through movement, gravity, and the presence of the wearer.

The project draws from early Tamil clothing systems in which cloth preceded tailoring. In the Sangam period and long after, dress was formed through unstitched lengths of fabric — veshti, pudaivai, angavastram, thundu — whose meaning emerged through drape, gesture, and context rather than cut. By returning to the logic of the single cloth, this work rejects stitched construction and reactivates a pre-modern textile philosophy in a contemporary artistic language.

I am producing a limited series of cyanotype textiles: reimagined angavastram pieces and poncho-like upper cloths. Each is made from a single plane of fabric with minimal intervention — in some cases, only a circular opening that allows the body to emerge from an otherwise continuous surface. The cloth remains structurally whole; the body does not wear the image but inhabits it.

Historically, the angavastram functioned both as a mark of dignity and as a utilitarian cloth — a shoulder drape, a towel, a head covering, a portable shade. This multiplicity resonates with my ongoing exploration of migration and non-belonging, where cloth becomes a temporary shelter and a mobile extension of home. These works are therefore gender-neutral and adaptable, capable of being wrapped, folded, or worn in multiple ways, mirroring the shifting identities of a migratory body.

Materially, the project engages a historical chromatic memory. Early angavastram were often indigo-dyed with contrasting borders. The deep blue of the cyanotype process echoes this indigo lineage, while the borders of the works are hand-embroidered in orange tones, referencing the traditional contrast while introducing a labour-intensive, tactile edge. The border functions both as a historical citation and as a threshold: a line between image and body, field and edge, memory and presence.

Cyanotype, a process dependent on exposure to sunlight, records absence as much as presence. When transferred onto draped cloth, the photographic image becomes unstable and contingent, shifting with the movement of the wearer. The body activates the archive; memory is no longer fixed on a wall but carried through space. The cloth becomes sky, surface, and shelter simultaneously.

These wearable works operate between sculpture, textile, and photography. They are not costumes and not replicas of historical dress, but contemporary reactivations of draped forms that foreground textile as primary structure. By refusing tailoring and embracing the single cloth, the works propose an alternative to fashion’s constructed silhouette, returning instead to a logic of continuity, adaptability, and embodied image.

In this series, the angavastram is not reproduced — it is translated. The poncho-like form is not a Western import but a rearticulation of the draped upper cloth within a migratory, transhistorical vocabulary. Each piece exists as both object and potential action: an image that can be worn, a garment that remains an artwork, a cloth that holds memory while offering temporary dwelling.