Roots of Radiance began with a question I could not quite put into words: what does inheritance look like when you can hold it?
I had been thinking about intergenerational transmission — what we carry forward from the people who came before us without always knowing we are carrying it. The gestures, the preferences, the ways of moving through a room. The things passed down without ever being named.
Cloth remembers. Every fold is a record of where it has been, who has touched it, what weather it has moved through.
I chose patterned fabric because fabric carries this kind of history so openly. The textiles I selected — a mixture of ankara prints and plain woven cottons — came from different sources: some bought new, some sourced from older pieces of clothing that had been worn and washed and worn again. The used fabric has a different quality to it. You can feel the time in it.
The technique is hand-cutting and layering — fabric cut into organic forms and built up on canvas in strata, each layer a different pattern, a different weight, a different colour temperature. The sculptural folding at the edges was partly planned and partly discovered. I kept pinning and unpinning the corners until the piece told me where it wanted to sit.
The first version was too ordered. Too obviously composed. I pulled half of it apart and rebuilt it more instinctively, trusting the materials to find their own arrangement within a loose structure I held. The second version had something the first did not: a quality of having grown rather than been constructed.
What Roots of Radiance is about, finally, is this: the visible and invisible inheritance that makes us who we are. The patterns in our families that we recognise and the patterns we do not. The radiance that comes up through the roots whether we tend them consciously or not. The work is an act of gratitude toward those roots. And a reckoning with them.
