Padma Rajendran
Wherever one goes or comes from, home remains a place to
have and to work toward. Feelings of comfort and belonging hold
us captive, and these senses can occur in a specific place or
simply the physical walls of a house. Ritual becomes the keeper
of boundaries within the home. This storytelling comes from
an interior place of living two cultural lives and manifests from
digging through the past of personal monuments and archived
histories. Gathering personal symbols authenticates something
forgotten and resurrects it to be experienced again. It allows
for an alternate unfolding of events and offers a new ontology.
I make visible the aftereffects of migration on domestic life for
contemporary women who are simultaneously from here and
elsewhere. Unseen experiences are traditionally lost to time. I
reside in the disintegration and cultural loss that accrues from
migration. Recollecting souvenirs and artifacts, I embrace the
imagery of the woven to instigate a psychological elasticity that is
still bound by opposing threads.