OBJECTS

ABOUT

Anusuya Krishnaswamy

Please tell us a bit about yourself.

Hi, I'm Anusuya. I'm originally from Bangalore, India, but currently based in Helsinki. It's been pretty much a year since I moved here to start my master's studies. Even though I grew up in India surrounded by textiles and crafts, I wasn't really drawn to it and I wasn't really taught particular crafts per se. My interest in crafts and textiles mostly came about during my bachelor's studies in India. I started my studies thinking that I wanted to study visual communication or graphic design, and then I just had one class in our first year about textiles when I came across a book about William Morris's patterns. Looking at it, It hadn’t struck me that this was something that could be studied or was something that people still do by hand. After doing that class, I took a weaving course where so many things seemed to click into place and then I was hooked.

Over the course of time, I feel that textiles made it easier to get to know people and especially in the stories that women share. Even now, most of the domestic work and textile work that's done at home is sort of treated as unimportant compared to more masculine work. So when I talk to women about textiles, they open up and talk about what they do at home with their families.

Last year, I was talking to my grandma, and I was telling her about weaving and she remembered that apparently as a kid she and her school colleagues went to visit a village famous for their loom weaving crafters. They had a mini-weaving competition to see who could be the fastest and grandma was second in the competition. I think that now I'm starting to connect the dots in the sense that it is in its communal aspects that there continues to be value in practising crafts.

Could you tell us more about your craft and how it has evolved over the years?

I think initially starting out, it was more about the means to an end. I came into the weaving world with a visual and graphic design lens, so I was thinking about how I can use the medium of textile to represent something. But now I've been developing my practice in a way where I'm focusing a lot on the process of making and allowing myself to make mistakes and be a bit more accidental and go to the flow. I have learned a bit more with time to let my intuition speak instead of going with a fixed idea of what I want to do.

How do think that the places, people, and textile traditions where you grew up, are now manifesting in your art?

Since I'm not at home at the moment, I've been reflecting more on this aspect as of late and I find hints of connections in small things in my practice, they are never fully conscious or intentional, but rather spring up as a result of my growing up and life in Bangalore. I discovered that one aspect is in the way I use colours. I feel that I'm very drawn to the ones I used to see back home, which are very strong, alive and combined in ways you might never think of.

Then going more into my personal process, maybe this is more like a vague relation, but I tend to keep my process very messy. I sometimes try to keep it organised, but then I find myself creating a mess or trying multiple things at the same time. I think that the way I grew up has influenced a lot in the way I approach my work, which is in this big city, with a very chaotic and crowded dynamic, and where things are happening all the time It's quite a nice contrast where the act of weaving is really slow and meditative, but then my process gets to be disorganised and messy sometimes.

What are the process and the thinking behind your pieces? How important is ´playfulness´ in this process?

I think that all of us are playful at heart and that over time as adults that just goes away. Making something can be a great way to connect more to our innate sense of playfulness. The starting point of my process would be choosing the colors. I tend to pick a certain set of colors that I want to use at that point in time, and then it's just this process of me trying out different things on the loom and seeing what works and what doesn't.

Sometimes I go in with a very clear idea of what I want to do, but other times I can just sit there for maybe two days without anything really coming up. Or then I weave maybe a centimeter then reverse the whole thing and then go back and forth. Sometimes you have to stop yourself and say, hey no, have some belief in yourself, and go ahead with it. You don't have to keep reversing, but in that way, I think it's sort of this push and pull or back and forth, where sometimes it's important to listen to the material, and let it speak for itself. Even the loom has its own times where it might work well, sometimes it doesn't.

And I think it's important to listen to that, in the process, and here comes the idea of playfulness. I try to not take myself too seriously and to be a bit loose and to really lose myself in the process. Sometimes I achieve a sort of flow state where I really get into what I'm doing, so I can keep going, and other times where it doesn't really work, and I take a break, come back, and try something new. Weaving involves a lot of repetitive processes but when you're actually in the process, it never feels like you're doing the same thing all the time and I think that's the beauty of it. The deeper you go into the process, the more new things you find out all the time, just by listening to the material. For me, being playful provides me with that rush or that energy that comes with the process where it gets me to wake up and say, okay, I'm gonna try this today. Playfulness helps me make these rapid decisions where I can start trusting my intuition more and achieve this balance between the rush and slowness.

How do you feel about working with your hands? Can you tell us more about the impact that it has on your happiness and well-being?

I think that's the most significant part of this process and is a great way to keep your rooted and connect to the craft and also the planet. When that happens, you sort of develop a greater appreciation of the world around you. I feel like this grounding reminds me that I am living in this body. I think that when we do work that involves only our mind there's a certain risk of losing yourself in that kind of overthinking, but when you work with your hands or with your body you're always reminded of the present.

With weaving, I think it's a connection between the hand, the body, and the mind. It all has to work together in a sort of harmony for the fabric to appear. I think especially over the past two-three years with COVID and lockdowns, I started to be more aware of my body and my mortality.

What and who inspires you?

I have many artists that I admire and follow their work. Off the top of my head at the moment, Zarina Hashmi and Agnes Martin. But I think in terms of drawing inspiration, I would say that mainly the main inspiration is my everyday life and my surroundings. I've been recently really inspired by the sunlight and the way it seems to fall on all these surfaces around me. Maybe moving from a very warm and sunny country to one where it gets cold and dark really fast, made me more aware of the impact of light.

Then I also like to go through archives of these old south Indian textiles, with their grids and stripes. I grew up seeing a lot of them because of my family and of course clothing in India involves all manner of colour and pattern, juxtaposed in such unique ways. The boldness and joy in that is also a big source of inspiration for me.

We know that you are recently doing your MA in textiles design. Can you speak a bit more about your favorite part of this program?

I study at Aalto University here in Helsinki. Here, I've been doing mostly textile design courses but I’ve also been dipping my toes into some chemistry ones. I think that the best part of it has been my peers and my friends who are studying in the same program as me. Things like sitting together, talking, doing our work side by side and the sense of community that comes with these experiences. It’s a great environment where all of us are constantly sharing knowledge with each other and discussing things. It kind of draws back to this idea about how all crafts are very community-oriented. I think not only because it makes you aware of the people around you, but also because everything you do in crafts is connected to people. Whether it's the materials you use, which come as well from people, or the tools you use and the people who made it.

Then I think one of the main reasons I chose to do a master's program was to kind of get to know more about the industrial aspects of textile design, which I didn't know much about. I'm currently learning about the problems of the system and how we can solve some of it from the inside. There has been a lot of focus on ideas of sustainability and that's something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

How important is it to you to prioritize the usage of discarded yarns and materials for your art?

I think that now looking back, it all started from my bachelor's studies because even though we do have an abundance of materials around us, it was really hard to source yarns at a smaller scale, at least in Bangalore, for our classes. I remember the excitement when one of my teachers told us about a cotton supplier, who spun yarns that was pretty much the same thickness and just in different colours. And then we used to go to markets, and it felt like these fun treasure-hunts, where we rummaged through boxes and asked around to find any unique ones. I pretty much worked around the same stash of material, just adding a few others here and there for a good while and most of them are still stored in my room.

Then during the covid, between my bachelor's and master's when I was working a bit, I got in contact with this small-scale company who generously gave me waste yarns discarded from their production. That's when I started to work on my project with discarded yarns. As I spent time untangling and sorting them, I felt that those yarns were alive in a sense that because they were discarded they had their own previous lifetimes in them. Even though I didn't know those stories, I could feel the memory that they held and while weaving them, I became more concentrated on thinking about what the future of that material could be. I also think that I'm a person that loves challenges and working with used materials is a beautiful challenge because you might have to think for a bit longer on how best you are going to use them and if this new form honours them.

May I ask your thoughts on how we can become better at reclaiming traditions & skills, and respecting people & processes?

think it's a very personal journey that all of us have to take for ourselves. The current mass consumption and production makes us disconnected from the ¨making¨of things and from the objects that surround us. I think it all status with cultivating curiosity or wondering about the things in the world. Maybe this is a slightly far-fetched example, but for me as a kid, I had these little picture books that would tell me how a pencil is made or how a peanut butter is made in a present day factory.

I believe that once you start doing that you realize that hey, there are so many materials, processes, and steps involved in making everything around us and that everyone depends on each other in some way or another. And that’s been the constant in whether it was an older system of production or the present industrial one. When it comes to reclaiming traditions and skills, looking back at all that has been passed down to us in the way we dress, move, create, or speak, I have come to realize that it's a long line. These traditions are not stuck in the past, they are very alive because of us choosing to continue with them. We are keeping it alive and we are transforming them and creating the future through them.

What upcoming projects make you excited right now?

What´s the name of the thesis?

Right now I'm still doing a lot of classes, but I think that the biggest upcoming thing would be my final thesis for my master's degree. It's still in a rather theoretical stage and I'm slowly buiI'm thinking of something along the lines of the everydayness of textiles. I'm very interested in the mundanity and routine in the weaving process, and I want to delve deeper into this topic.lding it up.