“Is the tree a burden for the earth? Is the branch a burden for the tree? Is the leaf a burden for the branch? Where does a woman go?” Using no chemicals or machines, Kalamkari is a multi-step process involving, sketching, hand-painting, and natural dyeing. A body returning to land is often understood as the end of life. In Body Blooms, Nikita reframes the land as a site of rest and release, particularly for women who bear the weight of oppressive systems. What may appear as exhaustion or ending becomes instead the seed of blooms. She imagines how land itself can become a medium of renewal, and how when the body becomes one with the land, new worlds can be imagined. Living in dialogue with the soil, plants, and air at Riveting Roots, Nikita Shah’s pieces are seen to return to the land themselves.

“The ill-bred chignon fell back to its bounteous freedom, their unruly length arrested by thick, spirally threads of jasmine.” Using no chemicals or machines, Kalamkari is a multi-step process involving, sketching, hand-painting, and natural dyeing. In Jasmine Skies, Nikita imagines a space where the earth breathes alongside the woman’s body. She asks: where do the land and the body go when they both let go, when torrential rain washes over parched soil? The work unfolds as a dream, perhaps even a myth, where each gust of wind and every drop of rain become an act of release. This piece is a meditation on surrender and passage. To breathe out is to open a space where grief, memory, and expectation dissolve and where imagination begins to bloom.

“Both my work’s being showcased imagines the land as a place of rest and renewal, especially for women’s bodies. Showing it at the Garden Gallery allows the piece to live in dialogue with the soil, plants, and air and it feels the most apt.”

Nikita Shah (b. Mumbai, India) is a Brooklyn-based artist and educator working with Kalamkari, a 3,000-year-old hand-painted textile tradition currently practiced in Sri Kalahasti, India. She follows its most traditional methods, using a bamboo kalam (pen) and natural dyes sourced from minerals and plants. While Kalamkari is often associated with chintz and tree-of-life motifs, Shah’s practice expands it to Kalamkari’s lesser-known lineage: its narrative story cloths, locally known as vrata pani (Telugu for “writing work”). Her work centers self-expression, embodied memory, and collective storytelling through the concept of Fursat, a pedagogy drawn from the South Asian concept of leisure, reflection, and wisdom. Drawing from folklore, femininity and mythology her work explores themes such as the somatic impact of abuse, the grief of being a woman within patriarchal, oppressive systems, and migration. Through the narrative potential of Kalamkari, Shah expands the form into self-portraits, abstraction, and soft sculpture, examining the reparative possibilities of ritual, land, and material as part of the healing process.

Nikita received her bachelor’s degree in Textile Design 2012 from the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Kannur, India and completed an Associate Degree in Fashion Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC in 2019. Nikita is an independent scholar researching Kalamkari storycloths at the Ratti Textile Centre at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She has worked with multiple fashion export and design houses in India and the USA for over fifteen years. In 2021 she launched her brand “untitle,” focused on an eco-conscious commitment to upcycle memorial clothing and dead stock textiles sourced for artisans in India. The only Kalamkari practitioner in the US, her work has been featured in publications and institutions like Paper Magazine, Juggernaut, The Hindu, Asia Society, Twelve Gates Arts, the Textile Society of America, New York Textile Month, Amherst College, Tufts University, the Fashion Institute of Technology, Bloomberg, Shopify, amongst others. In 2024, she was awarded the Brooklyn Arts Fund for At Home in Brooklyn, the first-ever communal Kalamkari Story-Cloth. Forthcoming publications include, “Henna’s New Medium: Dilemmas in Translating Color and Culture from Skin to Cloth,” in the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles, Vol. 4: Color, co-authored with Matthew Raj Webb.

IG: @nikita.untitle

http://www.un-title.com