Garvi Rathod

Nature’s Needlework is a series of narrative illustrations depicting a small quaint village where I spent summers as a child, a natural setting with a lovely lake blooming with lotus flowers. This project explores the contrast between the beauty of nature and the adverse effects of industrialization, which has resulted in the replacement of virgin land, home to a diverse array of flora and fauna, by massive factories. Once a source of life, the beautiful lake is now polluted with chemicals and waste from these factories. I used a combination of hand and digital painting to create the illustrations and embellished them with embroidery, patchwork, and appliqué produced with waste textiles sourced from the garment factories. I used sequences cut from soda cans instead of plastic sequences. Some of my embroidery techniques were inspired by Kantha, a traditional Indian craft often used to mend textiles. My project is aimed at sparking a conversation about the environmental destruction caused by the textile industry. Although innovations like digital printing may reduce its ecological impact, much remains to be done to protect the environment from the damage caused by textile production.