Lily Brar

This work, created alongside my mother and father, explores themes of fragmented identity and generational legacies. My great-great grandmother’s Khes takes centre stage. A narrative of cultural homelessness and reconnection is now woven into the 80-year-old family heirloom, made from indigenous brown cotton native to Punjab. Undertaken in collaboration with my mother and using patterns handed down in our family through generations, the phulkari remains incomplete. Silk threads left dangling as a mark of an ongoing legacy.

On our Khes, is projected a montage of photographs and illustration. The imagery recounts and reanimates the history of immigration in my family: The rebuilding of lost homes and picking up the pieces of another life. My mother recites a poem written by my father in Punjabi, detailing fractured memories of village life and the process of making as it begins from the cotton field. The sound of wind rustling through fields plays.