Textural Reflections on Home, Identity and Liminality by Anoushka Srivastava
What happens when home is no longer a single place?
For me, moving from Lucknow to Nottingham created a peculiar emotional geography: the homesickness of leaving one world while slowly learning to belong to another. Musafir: Journeying Through Liminal Space grew from this in-between state. Meaning “traveller” in Hindi, Musafir explores the transformation of cross-cultural identity, the point at which the familiar and unfamiliar begin to inhabit the same person.
Unexpectedly, architecture became my first bridge between worlds. Nottingham’s Gothic buildings awakened memories of Lucknow, where I had grown up understanding architecture as more than construction: as memory, emotion and witness to lives that had passed through it. Among unfamiliar streets, recognition arrived in fragments; an arch, a facade, the presence of history held within a building. In searching for home, I began finding traces of it somewhere new.
That recognition became textile.
Musafir: Emergence, Chikankari and blockprint in detail by Anoushka-Srivastava.
Chikankari, the delicate hand-embroidery tradition rooted in my hometown of Lucknow, became an anchor to inherited memory. I chose to embroider it myself, allowing cultural identity to remain present not only as motif, but through the movement of her own hand. Nottingham’s lace heritage entered differently, translated through laser cutting and its language of intricacy and negative space.
One is stitched; the other cut. One carries the intimacy of home; the other the experience of encounter. The hand remains visible beside the laser; Lucknow remains present as Nottingham enters.
Musafir: Confluence, by Anoushka-Srivastava
Their relationship unfolds gradually through three textile artefacts. Emergence is remembering, the instinctive pull towards home and the traditions that anchor us. Confluence is negotiation, as two textile languages begin to encounter and alter the same surface. Entwinement is becoming: embroidery, lace-inspired cutting, print and architecturally informed pleating intertwine until their boundaries become harder to locate. Neither culture is erased; neither remains entirely separate.
Musafir: Entwinement by Anoushka-Srivastava
The journey expands into ten feet of translucent organza, embroidered with shifting contours of gold, silver and white. Its transparency allows surfaces to meet without completely concealing one another. Lines overlap and separate; light passes through; boundaries appear, dissolve and re-form as the viewer moves around the cloth. The textile itself seems to inhabit an in-between state.
Liminal Space by Anoushka Srivastava
Here, liminality is not an emptiness between two identities. It becomes a space of possibility; a place where memory and encounter can coexist, and where another understanding of the self can emerge.
Musafir sees belonging not as a choice between places, but as something continually stitched into being—carrying traces of where we began while being transformed by where we arrive.
We move through places, but places move through us too.
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Further Information:
Born in India, Anoushka Srivastava is a designer, visual artist, and storyteller working with textiles, pattern, and material. Her practice explores the relationship between heritage and contemporary design, bringing traditional techniques into new contexts.
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Image Credits:
All images courtesy of Anoushka Srivastava and as credited in captions.