The Open Studio / Harshini kishan
Harshini kishan
Mumbai logo
A city spelled out in printed cloth and gold trim
Red dots crowd the cloth like a market at noon.
A blue swirl turns inside the U and does not stop.
Gold trim runs round each letter, a thin bright fence.
Paisley, flowers, tiny earrings on red: every letter wears its best.
Along the bottom, tassels wait to swing.
The wall behind is plain grey stone. The name is not.
The work
Harshini Kishan spells out her city in cloth. Six raised letters stand on a long panel. Each letter wears a different printed fabric: big flowers, blue swirls, pink paisley, small earrings on red. Gold trim edges every letter. Behind them sit strips of dotted red, deep blue and striped cloth. A bright fringe runs along the top. Red and green tassels hang below. Kishan works without a fixed plan. Her path into art runs through science and years as an Air India flight attendant.
- Theme
- City and textile memory
- Material
- Mixed media
- Year
- 2025
- Edition
- 1
- Framed
- No
- From
- Mumbai
- Code
- RC-2551
In the artist’s words
Harshini Kishan is a visual artist whose practice spans painting, textiles, and mixed media. Rooted in the interplay of spirituality, tradition, and contemporary expression, her work transforms fabrics, threads, and unconventional surfaces into vessels of cultural memory. By layering materiality into compositions that blur the boundaries between painting, installation, and textile art, she situates her practice at the intersection of physical presence and symbolic meaning. Her process is intuitive and open-ended. Each piece evolves organically, beginning without a fixed plan and gradually revealing its own direction through mark-making, texture, and form. Imperfections are embraced as integral to the narrative, lending her work a raw immediacy. Everyday encounters—objects, fleeting moments, subtle…
