Webster Library Exhibitions

Fieldnotes: Chapter 1
Untwist, roll, spin, twist, twist, weave, weave, weave, repeat.
Weave, weave, untwist, weave, return, weave, open, roll, spin, untwist, repeat.

October 15, 2026 – January 6, 2027

Webster Library, LB-2 vitrines, wooden display cases, and Discovery Counter

Fieldnotes: Chapter 1 emerges from my fieldwork in the Thar Desert, western Rajasthan, India, where I engaged with Pattu weavers and explored the material practices, motifs, and embodied knowledge embedded in this hand-spun and handwoven wool textile tradition.

The works translate fragments of my fieldnotes into textile form, drawing on the supplementary and extra-weft motifs of Pattu and reinterpreting them through wool, fleece, and pre-consumer textile waste. Through this process, I explore how textile knowledge is carried through making, touch, repetition, and intergenerational practice.

At the heart of the work is the act of untwisting. Machine-spun, twisted cords are laboriously taken apart and rewoven as warp. This process slows the material down, revealing traces of the labour, machinery, and time embedded within it. Untwisting becomes both a physical and reflective act: an opportunity to stay with a material, reconsider its possibilities, and look beyond its finished form or designation as waste.

These cords are woven with loosely spun wool and raw fleece, allowing their varied colours, textures, and irregularities to remain visible. As the weaving progresses, patterns emerge through repetition, touch, and material encounters. Industrial and handmade materials come into conversation, bringing different forms of labour and resourcefulness into relation with the lives of people, animals, and land.

The work is also shaped by my encounters with Pattu and by my grandmother’s dhabala, a hand-spun and handwoven woollen skirt embellished with colourful stitching at the hem. The motifs encountered during fieldwork resonated with those on her dhabala, connecting my research with embodied and intergenerational knowledge carried through textile practices. These connections bring different generations, places, and ways of making into dialogue, revealing how knowledge lives not only in what is recorded, but also in the gestures and materials through which it is practised.

Grounded in the slow time of handmaking, these textiles become fieldnotes in material form: records of encounters translated through unmaking, attending, and making. Presented alongside field photographs and a video featuring sheep and goats, the works extend beyond the woven surface to consider the living landscapes, animals, labour, and intergenerational relationships through which textile knowledge takes shape.

About Pramila Choudhary

Born in India, Pramila Choudhary lives and works in Montréal, Canada. She is a textile artist, designer, educator, and PhD candidate in Geography, Urban and Environmental Studies at Concordia University, where her research-creation practice explores textile traditions, material culture, and sustainability. She studied Textile and Industrial Design at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, India, and at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU), Switzerland. Her current research focuses on Pattu, a hand-spun and handwoven wool textile tradition of Rajasthan, north-west India, where she has developed her research into hand-spinning and hand-weaving techniques through fieldwork and artistic experimentation.