The broader premise of this Graduation Project, “Sandook”, is based upon preserving history in its various forms from a Textile centered research work and a collection accomplished previously by Madhurima Patni and her team, with the name of Documentation of Traditional Indian Garments (DTIG).
Madhurima Patni is one of the founding faculty of the discipline of Textile Design at NID, along with Helena Perheentupa and Aditi Ranjan. Her work resonates with preserving ancient and traditional printing and dyeing techniques in the Textile medium.
The Documentation of Traditional Indian Garments (DTIG) was a funded project by the Research and Publications department at NID to document and preserve the traditional wisdom of stitched garments worn by numerous communities in Gujarat and Rajasthan. This research work of Madhurima Patni with fellow team members later helped introduce craft documentation in NID’s Textile Design and Apparel Design curriculum. The DTIG project contains a research work of observing and studying people, communities, and cultures of the region of Gujarat and Rajasthan via the medium of Textile, Apparel, and its various aspects, both in the form of text and visuals documented in c.1980. The collection consists of four thousand odd objects, including textile pieces, illustrations, line drawings, maps, photographs, documents, and textual data.
The trajectories of this degree project are fragmented in three primary directions:
• Digitizing the collection and submitting it to the sponsor.
• Generating a systematic archive with detailed cataloging to submit at NID Press and KMC.
• Creating a book/exhibition from the digitized collection as an artistic expression.
This project attempts to bridge Photography and Textiles as two different yet similar mediums of self-expression and communication.
Bookmaking, Digital Archive, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Textile Collection
