Interview with Gopika Nath
Colette Copeland
December 2023
Thoughtnet III, 2022, free-style knitting and crochet
using different gauges of cotton thread.
I first met Gopika Nath the way most people meet these days—online. We were introduced by Fulbrighter alum Kathryn Myers, whose work about artists in India inspired my Fulbright research. As I followed Gopika’s work on Facebook, her writing about daily life, encounters with the natural world and her creative practice resonated with me as a holistic practice committed to self-discovery, innate curiosity with the world and a commitment to healing—oneself as well as the earth. Gopika Nath is a textile and fiber artist as well as writer whose work explores personal histories and the relationship between humanity and nature. She currently lives in Goa. This interview is a result from our afternoon conversation about beach walks, fiber art’s status within the larger art world context and the value of hand-crafted work.
Colette Copeland: In our conversations, you mentioned the early days of designing fabric, clothes, working with designers and retail stores just to survive. We also discussed how hand work/labor is undervalued. How did your work evolve from the commercial design world into a fine art, fiber arts practice?
Gopika Nath: It was primarily a journey of creative dis-satisfaction, as well as an emotional need for creative expression – to channel the angst that was building up. I had returned to India after my B.A.in art and design from Central School of Art and Design in London (now called Central St. Martins). In India during the mid 1980s, there was very little understanding of what design meant, or its value. I had specialized as a weave designer, but because there was (surprisingly) not enough work, I designed anything and everything from print designs for sarees, dress materials, carpets and dhurries, to even doing colorways (color combinations) for furnishing houses. I also worked with the Oberoi Hotel Group developing fabrics, designing uniform sarees and carpets. I did anything and everything in the textile design and development realm. I put my textile education to good use but was frustrated due to client production limitations.
I started painting sarees with commercial dyes – not the pigments and acrylic paints that most people used then. I had success with this, but nothing I did paid enough to sustain the business. I employed about 6-8 people on average, so there were payroll and rent expenses. During the studio’s 10-year tenure, I looked at fiber art magazines like Surface Design and Fiber Arts. I started working on some embroidered pieces but didn’t have the courage to take the leap into the fine art world. Eventually in 1996, my landlord substantially increased the rent, which I couldn’t afford. The neighbors also complained I was running a commercial establishment in a residential area, so I received an official notice from the Electricity Department and threatened with a whopping fine.
I felt grossly undervalued by clients who evaluated the price payable for my hand-painted fabrics based on the time they envisioned it would take, without regard for the skill that I had honed as an artist and designer. One client told me that artists were born to struggle financially. Unfortunately, how much you earn is a huge criteria for measuring success. There was a lot of familial dissent with my professional choice, especially when it came to shutting down the studio.
Before the studio closure, I was also working with weavers in Andhra Pradesh and the tribal belt of Bastar, then later with crewel embroidery craftsmen from Kashmir. The local villagers could no longer afford handlooms. Most started wearing mill-made polyester, which was easy to care for. Many had never stepped out of their villages. I experienced first-hand, not just the poverty and simplicity of their lives, but how dependent they were on designers and the government agencies to interpret the larger, global choices. Government agencies didn’t care much, which was very disheartening. I had occasion to see the samples that I developed gifted to visiting dignitaries or not see the trade fair they were designed to be exhibited in overseas, because of dispute between bureaucrats as to who was entitled to the free overseas ticket. It all came down to the business that we designers could garner for them. How could I help the villagers? Opting for a craft that was accepted as traditional – (contemporary hand painting with dyes wasn’t) helped anchor my purpose in bringing attention to hand crafting and adding my voice to those that promoted the value of working with the hand.
Embroidery was the medium I chose, not just because of the simplicity and limited space needed but because embroidery is possibly the best known of all hand-crafting practices in India. At the time, I felt I could make a difference by shifting the general attitude towards working with the hand. Compared to the rural craftsmen, I had a privileged education and upbringing and was possibly better placed to do this, by taking hand crafting into the art gallery space – which at that time was booming. It was a complex evolution over a decade of various experiences that compelled me to move beyond design towards the more expressive domain of art.
CC: One of the themes that keeps coming up for me in your work is the concept of slow time. Your needle work and stitching are very time and labor intensive. There is a conscious slowing down of the process and the output of work, which is contrary to our culture which promotes high yield production. I view this as a form of resistance, challenging prescribed boundaries surrounding art and artists. But slow time also allows for inward reflection. Please discuss the concept of slow time in your work.
GN: Working with textiles is always slow. Whether you are weaving or knitting or doing embroidery, it is a slow process. It is also a repetitive process and enables one to be reflective as they work. It is the slowness that anchors one within oneself. This becomes more relevant with the internet and digital technologies that over-stimulate our minds. I have never thought of my work as any kind of resistance or rebellion, for it evolved as a kind of necessity. I needed expression. I needed creative challenges. Working with textiles was what I enjoyed doing, it was what I knew how to do and that the output was slower than the output that other methodologies of art and living could provide, was never an issue.
When I started thinking in terms of art versus design, I went back to the canvas but realized that it didn’t have the magic that textiles held for me. If it had not been for the fiber magazines that I read over the years, I may not have had the courage to use textiles as my medium for art making, but it also seemed a natural evolution from design to art–to use the fabric that I had been working with in some form or another since 1976.
Having clarity over one’s feelings grants us agency in this universe – a spiritual view of life. It enables us to know what we feel, what we want and intend. I have always been inclined towards work that was detailed, whether it was pencil drawings or embroidery. I like the process which allows me to mull over things. Almost opposite to the frenetic pace of contemporary life, this slowness of stitching becomes something to share. A means to slow down and catch your breath in the midst of a chaotic pace.
.Geographical distances are eroding in terms of cultural sharing. How does one express oneself authentically, if we do not have contemplative time? Life is reduced to a clever sound byte. Despite rushing to meet deadlines, slowing down helps ground me. A slow methodology of making may be against the tide, but it is fundamental to a balanced and authentic life.
Indrajaal IV, 2023, 5 x 8 inches,
photography, digital printing, stitching, beadwork.
CC: I’ve been enjoying your ongoing photographic series from your weekly beach walks. How do these walks inspire your fiber work, especially the net series?
GN: Living near the sea, I go for a weekly beach walk. For 7 years I’ve observed life on the seashore in its many manifestations. I’m a keen photographer and iphone technologies have evolved to provide portability and flexibility. I can be in the moment and click what comes up.
Walking on the same stretch of beach every week has enabled me to reflect on life, looking for connections and metaphors between the physical aspects of nature and myself. I study the shells, the fishing nets, the crabs and their feeding residue. I examine patterns including the mud adhesion ripples and rill marks on the sand, as well as how the water, sun and wind impact the landscape. For example, the nets entrap fish. The net symbolizes physical and mental entrapment, which was especially prevalent during the pandemic lockdown.
Although embroidery has been the mainstay of my art practice and later crochet, I moved towards knitting during the lockdown. In that chaotic state of mind, I would drop stitches or pick them up at random, using different gauges of thread. It had a cathartic effect of easing the mind, by simply bringing forth visually what I was unable to express in words. I wasn’t consciously knitting forms, but one day I put the form on my head and while looking in the mirror, said “it’s a thoughtnet.” I knitted more and wrote short poems that I called ‘words for thoughtnets’. This refers back to the idea of a net as a vessel for containment.
As the concept of the net evolved, I realized that nets entrap just as the ‘indrajaal’ of Hindu philosophy. Lord Indra created a net glistening with jewels that entrapped the rakshas (demons). The net has also become synonymous with ‘maya ka jaal’ or the net of illusion, which entraps us with attachment to materiality, resulting in disillusionment and suffering. I am using this concept of the ‘indrajaal’ to work on photographs of elements that I find on the beach, creating a fine net over the image, with beadwork at the junctures. For instance, a crab isn’t just a crab trapped in the net. It becomes emblematic of the crabby state of mind that entraps us. An illusion within the illusion of life……An extension of the ‘thoughtnets’.
CC: As you know, my research centers around female artists’ work who are exploring borders and boundaries. We discussed how fiber arts has been marginalized in the contemporary art world, thus not getting the attention it deserves. I see your work challenging those boundaries. On a conceptual level, your work expands boundaries with the natural world. How does your work engage with symbolic, emotional and philosophical limits/borders that exist between human and natural life? I am thinking about some of your work that references brokenness, letting go, and consciousness.
GN: My art has always been a mirror to the self. In the clam shells I collected, I saw the genetic patterns influenced by the environment—a kind of camouflage to divert predators. The idea of a response that is both defensive and protective coming from a genetic space resonated with me. I equated this with the kind of behavioral patterns that we as humans enact, based on subconscious patterns that are formed through our conditioning– familial, social, political, financial and emotional as well as educational experiences and learning. We don’t exist in isolation and much of what we do is determined by these factors. We form either a defense or protection against them, or retreat into the familiar even if it is punishing, because the familiar is comforting, strange as it may seem.
I find cues from the natural world. I look for them because they are less threatening than human encounters. On one of my walks, I found the beach was covered with many shells, but none were whole. I realized that the broken shells symbolized the brokenness in me that I wasn’t willing to acknowledge.
After collecting the broken shells, a Goan friend suggested crocheting with them. Ironically, it was the broken shells that I found easy to crochet around. It was the brokenness that I hooked my thread through to create icons of thoughts and later immerse them in the sea through a photographic representation in the ‘visarjan series.
After working with shells many years, I started photographing them. I enlarged the photographs, reducing the pixels to about 2, creating a pattern of squares (pixelations) that were created solely by color.
Color is what I have always equated with cultural moorings. Each color has a socio-cultural significance and is also related to emotional qualities. In Hindu astrology, colors also have a corrective effect on our destiny. I taught color theory for years to design students and through that had an opportunity to understand the significance of color. Kandinsky attributed certain sounds to certain hues. Color is also equated with character, a result of adopted behavioral patterns.
Much of my fine art textile practice was ahead of its time, especially within the context of art in India. In that sense, you could say that it has been marginalized. Even the very idea of a professional design studio in India, in the 1980’s wasn’t the norm – far from it. It was my passion that kept me going. I wrote about it, I taught it, conducted workshops and continue to do so to create greater awareness about the materials and processes within the framework of contemporary art.
When I went to the U.S. for my Fulbright, my mentor Tom Lundberg who heads the Fiber Arts program at CSU in Fort Collins, Colorado, said that in the West, fiber artists ceased to try and compete with the ‘fine art’ world and it was a niche community, but one that is very active. Textile making is slow. The medium is fragile. It isn’t valued as highly as painting or sculpture. For that reason, many artists do not pursue it. Textile/fiber arts might always be marginalized, even if the artists find ways to make their presence felt.
Stitch Journal, chair on matte fabric, drawing directly with thread, 2023.
“Stitch is a language, if we let the thread feel.
Stitch is a language if we let the needle speak.” – Gopika Nath
CC: This past summer you hosted a slow-stitch retreat in your community. You taught stitching techniques to participants, but the retreat’s focus seemed to be about the communal encounters and relationships made during the experience. As I followed your posts about this experience, it reminded me of stories my grandmother told me about knitting circles or quilting bees. Tell us more about this project and the experiences of the participants.
GN: Honestly, of all the workshops that I have done over the past few decades, this one was by far the most disappointing. The venue changed at the last minute, participants who were keen to attend were unable to get away for health and other reasons and many couldn’t quite afford to spend what it was going to cost for travel, board and lodging plus the tuition. Of those that did come, most were very naïve about art making and the qualities of healing through creativity. Aside from the slowness of stitch which aids a contemplative space, the Ayurvedic wellness center which was the location for the retreat, also facilitated healing at very profound levels.
I love textile stories and my social media posts prior to the retreat were filled with my favorites, intended to convey what the workshop would be about. However, some didn’t seem to have understood this and expected it to be a fun event rather than a contemplative one. They were also not that keen to engage with the local community and craftmanship. The outcome of the retreat left me feeling very low, especially with the realization that I planned something that would be educational, healing and creative, but participants were not necessarily committed to learning and taking it forward.
I decided to make the teaching sessions hybrid to enable those that couldn’t travel to join us. For local Goans who couldn get away the full 5 days, I offered the option of attending for just one or two days, as they could find the time. On one of the days, one reputed Goan artist joined us and this was the most enriching session because we had conversations around art making.
I enjoy teaching what I have learned. Teaching enables me to keep learning and there was learning here too, just not what I had hoped. Perhaps that was my naive hope. Even though I don’t always acknowledge it, I am quite tired of being on the margins, feeling isolated and alienated from the mainstream art world. It is sometimes difficult to wake up in the morning and keep doing what is not of interest to most of the world that I inhabit, struggling to be heard and seen in the way that would not just help financially but psychologically too. Sometimes, I do wonder what it would be like to be better integrated in this space, rather than sitting on the periphery of it.
Gopika Nath: Text and Textiles →
Creativity with Gopika on Instagram →
This is the seventh in a series of interviews Colette Copeland will be doing as part of her Fulbright Research Award to India. Her research focuses on socially engaged artists whose work explores themes of borders and boundaries.
Interview with Moutushi Chakraborty →
Interview with Riti Sengupta →
Interview with Jyotsna Siddharth →
Interview with Mallika Das Sutar →
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Colette Copeland is an interdisciplinary visual artist, arts educator, social activist and cultural critic/writer whose work examines issues surrounding gender, death and contemporary culture. Sourcing personal narratives and popular media, she utilizes video, photography, performance and sculptural installation to question societal roles and the pervasive influence of media, and technology on our communal enculturation.
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