In What part of you survives in me, which was recently displayed at the Canvas Gallery in Karachi, Ruby Chishti’s enigmatic sculptures appear like a flotilla encapsulating women’s vulnerability, strength and beauty.

She weaves the journey of her wounds, dreams and passion to mirror the same in society. Much like a social cartographer, the data is collected from the source: hers from the most ordinary chindis and katrans — leftover sewing material of women’s garments. She may have found these during her regular commute from Brooklyn, where she lives, to thrift shops in Manhattan. Or at a seamstress’s basement on a visit to Toronto.

A readymade garment is reassembled, serving as raw material for her enchanting hand constructions. Somewhere between attire, construction and sculpture, these assemblages evoke stories of the imagined biographies of unknown women, to whom these pieces once belonged.

I recall Chishti purchasing a tunic on our shopping spree in Karachi and, between breakfast and an early morning meeting, she decided to cut up the tunic, and re-stitched it by hand. Her obsession with cloth, she says, is such that she will be watching your attire and imagining what she could do with it!

Somewhere between attire, construction and sculpture, Ruby Chishti’s assemblages evoke imagined biographies

The point is that she has an effortless ease with her medium. Hence, naturally, there are also connections to the body, as one finds resonance in the ideas of the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois: “For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture.” Yet, to find a similar chronology in Chishti’s work would be to limit its layered and organic contexts. In Chishti, the references are as much metaphorical as they are to the physical body.

An earlier work, such as ‘My Birth Will Take A Thousand Times No Matter How You Celebrate It’ (2001), is of doll-like figures coiled in a sitting pose, placed head down in a circle. In cast fabric stuffed with humble material such as straw and yarn, Chishti recreates how she imagined the family women mourned at her birth.

This autobiographical narrative relates to a larger cultural and social milieu of gender bias, exclusion and patriarchy. There is no defiance or militancy in her approach. She weaves her narrative in the quiet of her studio by the lake, deeply attentive to the cycles of nature, and her place in it.

Taking care of her mother who was paralysed for 11 years allowed Chishti, perhaps, to process the intensity of both the emotional and physical pain, and to live with the fear of an impending death. She would lift her mother’s heavy body, bathe, dress and feed her and says that she knew the contours of her mother’s body so well that her mind and hands could “create” her.

In those days, she started using wool and whatever material was available at home, to make figures. Perhaps it is from this experience that emerged references to fragility, both in her concept and approach to the material. Bulky structures that resemble the body, attire and homes, with windows like age-old jharokas [projected windows] and crumbling architecture, are held in place by a bare thread — “aik taanka [a single stitch]”, she says. It is the thread that holds time.

Chishti opens the wound, so to speak, in her openness to absorb from the pain of others. She wants every wrong stitch to be visible, every mark that bears witness to her process. Common pins, metal wires, and the stitching are exposed in a way that there is no right or wrong side — the material tells its story.

In ‘What fragment of you survives in me?’ there is a sense of celebration. An abundance of magical shimmer creates a sensual space and glistens though her signature melancholic earthy ‘skin’ tones. Particularly striking is the glowing image of a body of fire in the work titled, ‘Born of fire’, pointing to the Sequoia tree which grows in fire — a reference to the California wildfires. This work, full of charged energy, is appropriately given an exclusive display room.

Chishti’s constructions are like the inner and outer body, the garment like the skin, the land and the sea. Crochet laces and scrumptious brocades are layered like the “sedimentation of cloth… of untold biographies of cloth stitched over countless times,” in the artist’s own words.

She becomes the voice of resilience for the dispossessed woman. The work titled ‘Sea Shirs The Sand Where My Foot Rests’, she explains, references the act of shirring, which is to gather cloth into decorative rows by parallel stitching.

“I was imagining that a ship was sailing towards a place that would not be hostile, but comforting and protective. And when she would place her foot on the shore, the sea would bring or collect the sand under her feet.”

‘What part of you survives in me’ was exhibited at the Canvas Gallery in Karachi from March 15-24, 2022

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 24th, 2022