Hand Embroidery: The Dying Art and its Artists by Tushita Singh

In the past 18 years, Tushita Singh - an Apparel Designer, closely observed how hand embroidery techniques seem to be losing their rightful place in the segment of surface ornamentation. The core idea behind her creating hand embroidered artworks is to highlight their diminishing significance. This loss has a lot to do with the adoption of fast fashion labels across the globe.

Tushita wishes to elevate hand embroidery to a more artistic and tasteful level by positioning them as true luxury that should be given their rightful place in a world of computer-based embroideries and digital prints.

Another concern with the industry at the moment is the treatment of artisans in this sector. Many hand embroidery artists, particularly the ones employed in Indian exports, were badly affected during the pandemic and suffered job losses. The aim of artisans in this area should not only be to design new embroidery artworks but to meaningfully preserve hand embroidery and skill-based creative experiments.

Tushita enjoys observing the patterns of land and water bodies. They emerge as a strong source of design inspiration for her embroidery artworks

A bird’s-eye view of various terrains is something that captures her imagination. It is an immersive experience to design and play around with a wide variety of forms, colours and textures and materials. Her colour palette is largely natural and earthen tones with a few surprise hints of colours spread around the artworks.

Tushita works with an expert embroidery artisan, Sonu Khan, to create these artworks at her design studio in New Delhi, India. She conceptualizes, hand paints the backgrounds on fabrics, and even foil prints some of them. She then guides the artisan to create the textures through various styles of hand embroideries. Her artworks are available for viewing on her Instagram handle @bluerabbithole.