The Open Studio / Ayushi Singh
Ayushi Singh
Traditional Banarsi
Every gold thread here is a brushstroke
Deep maroon, the colour of a wedding cupboard.
Gold vines cross and knot into small windows.
In each window a flower stands upright and still.
The borders crowd with leaves that never stop climbing.
No thread lifts from this surface. No light catches a weft.
Only paint, patient as a weaver, pretending to be silk.
The work
Ayushi Singh paints a Banarasi silk by hand. There is no loom here. The gold trellis, the small flowers and the wide floral borders are all made with poster colour on a sheet of paper 84 × 59 cm. Singh, from Sandila, studies at Banaras Hindu University. Her work grows from Indian textile traditions. She does not want to copy them. She wants to understand them. In this 2025 work she learns a famous pattern the slow way, one petal at a time.
- Theme
- Banarasi brocade in paint
- Material
- Poster colour on paper
- Size
- 84 × 59 cm
- Year
- 2025
- Edition
- 1 of 1
- Framed
- No
- About the artist
- Banaras Hindu University
- From
- Sandila
- Code
- RC-393
In the artist’s words
My practice comes from a close relationship with textiles, craft, and the everyday visual culture around me. Growing up in India, I have always been surrounded by fabrics, colours, prints, embroidery, and handmade objects. Over time, I began to look at these familiar things differently—not only as beautiful surfaces, but as forms of knowledge that carry stories, skills, memories, and connections between people. Textile design allows me to explore these connections through making. I enjoy working with processes such as printing, embroidery, weaving, tapestry, and surface manipulation because they give me time to understand the material. I am interested in the small details that appear through handwork—the irregularity of a…
