A dining table cut in half is not a metaphor. It's a decision. That's where Harsheen Kaur starts. The Goldsmiths BA Design graduate, winner of the 2026 Christine Risley Award, took a piece of formal Victorian furniture, the kind built to hold a body upright and obedient, and severed it. Between the two halves she wove a net, and that net is where the whole argument of her work lives.
Harsheen Kaur, Table from Play: De-Colonial Subversion and Emotional Refuge, 2026.
Kaur's project, Play: De-Colonial Subversion and Emotional Refuge, looks at what happened to Indian domestic space after the British Raj arrived. Before colonial rule, home interiors in India followed Vedic spatial philosophies: textiles, low mattresses, bolsters, arrangements built around how a body felt rather than how it looked when seated. Rest was collective and built into the furniture itself. Colonial administrators read this as disorder. High-backed chairs and dining tables followed, engineered for posture and propriety, and with them came a redesigned relationship between furniture and the body it contained.
Harsheen Kaur, Table detail from Play: De-Colonial Subversion and Emotional Refuge, 2026.
Reference details for Play: De-Colonial Subversion and Emotional Refuge by Harsheen Kaur: Horniton Lace, Victoria and Albert Fashion and Textile Collection
Kaur's response works through craft rather than commentary. The net stretched between the two table halves is filet lace, made using a technique associated with Victorian doilies and table linens, historically among the most genteel of domestic handwork. She has kept the structure and swapped the content: the rose that recurs through Victorian lace patterns becomes a lotus, and the grid draws its proportions from the charpai, the woven rope bed frame designed for lounging and shared rest across South Asia. Formal dining furniture, extended not for guests but for refuge, becomes a place to lie down in...
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Image Credits:
Lead: Harsheen Kaur, Table from Play: De-Colonial Subversion and Emotional Refuge, 2026.
All further images as credited in captions.