Suchitra Mattai ’ s sari tapestry underscores her concern for the movements of peoples — particularly women of the Indian diaspora . In a wall a sea a sorrow she engages with the passport as a potent object of migration for its potential to speak to who and what gets left behind and what survives and what is mourned in acts of migration . Mattai prints onto fabric her family ’ s Guyanese passport pages featuring portraits of the artist and her mother as their younger selves and the departure stamps marking their multiple migrations . She weaves , braids , and drapes them into a sea of vintage saris — the traditional garment worn throughout the Indian diaspora . Teeming with laborious detail , texture , and materiality , a wall a sea a sorrow is deeply coded . Visible and hidden in the folds of the work , these passport pages , marking the migrations of two generations of women , translate as symbols of all the things we carry , tangible and intangible , across borders .
“ Though the passport holds power , it prevents mobility for so many ,” notes Mattai . “ My family ’ s passports serve as a portal to the past — a literal past-port .” In this renaming of “ pastport ,” Mattai alludes to the long arc of history of migration of Indian women — many of whom have been and remain passport-less — who have shaped the Indian diaspora . She invokes her and her mother ’ s contemporary migrations to Canada and the United States , as well as an ancestral migration origin story that started long before they left Guyana . That of her Indian ancestors brought by the British from India to the Caribbean , beginning in the 1830s and throughout the early 1900s , to work as indentured servants on British Guiana ’ s sugar cane plantations . Towering in scale , Mattai intends a wall a sea a sorrow to be a monument of mobility to bridge women of the past with women of the present and future .
In Mattai ’ s a wall a sea a sorrow , each sari contains multitudes : the history of who made it , who wore it , who loved it , who lost it . Meaning “ strip of cloth ” in Sanskrit , saris are constructed of 6 to 9 yards of unstitched fabric twisted about the body into a robe and shawl . As Mattai collects each sari , she weaves the experiences of countless women into a statement of connection and continuity , despite the migration that threatens to unwind the fabric of families and personal identity . In a wall a sea a sorrow , community materializes into a never-ending process of weaving , tying , and beautiful tangling .
— Catherine Uritis Classical Archeology , Classics
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