What colour is your cloth and what stories are woven into your fabric?

LAHORE BUREAU —Dear Faith Ringgold, While viewing your work at MET, NY, I thought of my mother and her sewing circle. Your story quilts unexpectedly brought to mind a childhood memory in southern Punjab. My mother would invite women from marginalised neighborhoods to sit together and make gindi — the traditional art of making quilts from pieces of old clothing.

Among the fabrics were her own favourite dresses and dupattas, sometimes from suits she had worn and eventually passed on. Rather than letting them fall into disuse, she gave them a new life. Looking at your quilts, I realised that what you were doing through art echoed what my mother did as a way of life.

More recently, this memory has also come alive through the Ardsley Story Quilt introduced to me by Sania Samad, a Pakistani-American textile artist. The project offers an opportunity to revisit quilt-making as collective storytelling, where individual experiences and memories find expression through fabric.

We hope to see this work soon in Lahore, where it can spark a conversation between textile traditions across cultures and generations. It is fascinating how a practice rooted in domestic life can become a means of documenting identity, building relationships and creating a shared cultural narrative.

Sindhi Ralli, made by joining fragments of fabric through patchwork, appliqué and embroidery, carries a similar legacy. Different cultures, different materials, different names, yet a shared impulse to make something meaningful from what we have inherited. Today, we might describe this practice as sustainability.

Long before upcycling became a contemporary design vocabulary, women extended the life of materials, preserved skills and created beauty from what was available. But something else was happening around those quilts: relationships were forming, knowledge was being exchanged and women were finding a space for themselves.

A contemporary continuation of this idea can also be found in the Lahore Biennale Foundation's participatory textile initiative WeMend, which explores fabric as a language of social identity and collective expression. At Forman Christian College University, we hope to bring this spirit into our own community through Arts to Hearts: Fostering Cultural Awareness and Communal Harmony.

Through collaborative embroidery, patchwork and surface decoration, students, faculty and staff are invited to contribute their own stories. I imagine this growing into The Fabric of Fellowship: Community Portraits — a collective textile artwork in which every participant contributes a fragment of their identity, memory or cultural heritage.

Each piece remains distinct, yet together they represent a diverse community. There is a larger question here that I would like to share with our readers. How well do we really know the cultural and creative practices that surround us? They are not confined to ethnicity, nationality or religion.

The language spoken at home, the food prepared for a celebration, the music we inherit, the clothes we wear, the rituals we observe and the values that we hold shape our relationships with the world around us. Learning about another person's culture can challenge our assumptions, broaden our perspectives and nurture empathy.

It lets us recognise difference without turning it into division. Perhaps collaborative craft offers an unusually gentle way to begin such conversations: sitting together, making something with our hands and listening to one another. These projects are not simply about making a quilt or gindi.

They are about making connections, getting to know each other and working collectively toward a common good. The fabric is only a beginning; the real creation is the community that grows around it. After all, a quilt does not become beautiful because its pieces are identical. Its beauty emerges from the colours, textures and histories that come together without losing their individuality.

This principle offers an aesthetic framework: unity in multiplicity, where harmonious patterns arise not from sameness, but from celebrating difference. Communities, like quilts, thrive when diversity is woven together with intention, forming a cohesive whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Bano Nov 2026