Hannah Sabapathy’s personal history with patterns started early.
She has vivid memories from childhood, ‘my grandma would make these kolam designs at the threshold of our house. They’re done in rice flour to welcome people into the house… intricate patterns that you kind of squat down and do without lifting your hand.’
‘When I was a teenager, she drew them all out for me in blue biro. And so I have them now. They’re a pattern that is passed down through the female line from mother to daughter, you know, in my case, her to me. You were meant to learn and copy.’
Curiously, the current focus of her research is on the copying and imitation of South Asian textiles in Britain in the 19th Century, ‘we are familiar with the story of paisley as a copy of the buta, but the extent of what was incorporated goes beyond that. We need to consider where the legacies of this imitation and copying are today.’ At this year’s Dundee Design Festival, she will be exhibiting a faceted furniture piece featuring different techniques and motifs mimicking natural patterns.
The process of dealing with these themes and creating work in response starts deep in the archives.
She’ll spend her time quietly exploring until something stands out, then take notes on the books and materials, but also record how she feels, observing the journey of discovery itself and the elements that intrigue her along the way. From that initial burst of curiosity, Hannah’s art will unravel.
But far from a matter that gets settled in academic research, Hannah’s wrestling with this issue takes place in the studio, ‘I’m using methods of copying, imitation, cutting and collage to explore and consider these colonial histories through my own creative response. The aim is to begin to understand the absorption of South Asian patterns into British design.’
Discovery is in the making, as she explains, both imitating and copying as well as rearranging what’s been made before into something new. ‘The archives give me a kind of starting point to initiate conversations, and there might be more things that need to be filled in from archival visits. But really, there’s a lot of thinking that goes on in the making.’
That’s the thing about studying the making of copies, the way they are made is as interesting as the product. There is a level of immersion required in understanding them and the hidden insights in their creation. In order to fully learn from this history, Hannah has to live it out and reenact it.
She speaks about the themes in her work, and the questions that surround it, with an appreciation that ‘there is not going to be a paragraph at the end that fully answers every aspect.’
Understanding of patterns, then, becomes an entryway to much more than it is often portrayed to be. ‘It can often be quite superfluous, it can feel like an add-on. But I think it really enriches life, it adds a different way of viewing and interacting with the world. And I think that’s why I’m really drawn to the history and understanding, and unpicking these objects, because I think it can provide you with a route into bigger, more important things.’
The immersion in this practice, however, goes beyond just the studio. Growing up with a mother from England and a father from Chennai, Hannah had a close look at the relationship between cultures and early glimpses of textures and textiles that, as the years went by, posed questions about their history.
Looking back at the kolam designs her grandmother would make with flour, Hannah thinks about their transient nature. ‘Ants can take away the rice flour, or birds can come and eat it, and you welcome your guests and the patterns shift and move as people walk through them.’
The pattern is both imbued with enough meaning to be passed down through generations and malleable enough that it quickly degrades once created. These two themes also seem present in the way Hannah approaches her practice, both with an inquisitive archiving of the past and an embodied, experiential reenactment of it.
‘… that linear passing down of a pattern… even though you’re copying, it will never be the same thing. It won’t be an exact copy, it will always be a slightly different iteration.’
While her work begins in the depths of the archive, it eventually transcends and speaks to the areas where the personal meets historical. Not only the textile patterns, but also the patterns of human experience and community.
Susan Sontag once wrote that ‘Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable.’
Hannah Sabapathy zooms in on patterns and textiles, but her designs cannot help but say something about what it’s like to be alive.
Something ineffable.
Written by Sam Gonçalves