Reevah Agarwaal
As someone who grew up within an extremely traditional domestic structure in India, my work explores the idea of “home” through the Indian family ecosystem. My artworks function as an inventory of the past by using heirloom textiles and objects as vessels for personal and familial memories. My goal as an artist is to decipher the complex emotions that exist within intergenerational family dynamics. I want to create objects that pay homage to the past while also critically examining it.
I make quilts and paintings that use my late grandmother’s clothing, my own clothing, and other textiles acquired from family members throughout the years. Apart from quilts and textiles, I also make prints and collages that reference old, forgotten photographs from my childhood. I recreate these images as a means to reconcile with the past. My aim is to use nostalgia and memory to create frameworks that try to make sense of Indian family systems that, in my experience, have often felt paradoxically both loving and stifling. My works on paper and my textile work both rely on the processes of collecting, cutting, organizing, and putting together an assortment of materials that evoke different emotions or relate to events in my family’s history. These processes represent me reclaiming my personal history from a tumultuous past of intergenerational trauma and complicated relationship dynamics in the home, an experience that is not unique to me but speaks to the framework of the urban Indian family at large. By recreating old photographs using my chosen materials, I reconstruct narratives to process grief and childhood trauma while still expressing love for my family members and a sense of permanence for those I am grieving. While I consider my practice interdisciplinary, traditional printmaking methods have been a foundation in developing my ideas. The practice of transferring images, working in layers, and mediating between art and craft is hugely influential to my process while creating both my textile works and my works on paper. The processes of hand stitching and embroidery were first taught to me as a child by my grandmother before I pursued formal training in fiber arts at SAIC during my undergraduate years. I believe the acts of needlework and stitching are actions of love and are symbolic of my lineage and relationship with the women in my family.
Reevah Agarwaal is a multi-disciplinary artist and poet from New Delhi, India, currently based in Chicago, IL. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. Her work explores nostalgia, family dynamics, and the idea of home using repurposed textiles and objects with personal history. She creates quilts and collages referencing her family history and the domestic spaces she has lived in. By employing material history and referencing family heirlooms, she aims to trace the past and reconstruct memories through her artwork. Her work has appeared in various group shows in Chicago including at SAIC Galleries, Free Range, Locus Gallery Show at The Martin, and Member Exhibitions at Spudnik Press Cooperative. She is also a teaching artist at SkyART, a non-profit organization in South Chicago.
