Shradha Kochhar (b. Delhi, India) is a textile artist and knitwear designer based in New York, as well as the co-founder of apparel and clothing brand LOTA. Best known for her home spun and hand knitted ‘khadi’ sculptures using ‘kala cotton’ - an inherently organic cotton strain indigenous to India, her work is at an intersection of material memory, sustainability and intergenerational healing. Focusing on generating a physical archive of personal and collective south asian narratives linked to women’s work, invisible labor and grief, the work is large scale and will exist beyond whispers over generations.
The work is made from hand spinning ‘Kala cotton’ - a cotton crop indigenous to India on a portable booklet spinning wheel (charkha) and hand knitting it into textures and structures that mimic the skin on our bodies. Focusing and investigating resources lost and born out of colonization in India such as ‘Khadi’ - a self reliant and equitable practice of textile making and ‘Kala Cotton’, a miracle cotton crop that sustains completely on seasonal rainfall as solutions to climate change, water shortage, soil degradation and social inequity. Built from an ongoing library of seed bank that documents indigenous cotton strains found across the world, unraveling the intersection of words - ‘cotton’, ‘cloth’, ‘colonization’ and ‘community’. Shradha's mission is to understand the potential in soil and to establish an alternate system of textile farming and making, that discourages modern technology that feasts on the felling of forests and extraction of resources.
In this episode, we discuss regenerative resources and how we can think about materials in a more cyclical way, soft sculpture and the knitted essay, and how collaboration and the act of building community can make an art practice that much stronger.
