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...
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Image Credits:
All images courtesy of Anoushka Srivastava and as credited in captions.