by Priya Nair · Williamsburg, NY
Collage as archaeology. Layered found materials, domestic fragments, and accumulated time — wearable archives of the everyday.
Priya's studio floor is organized by year. Not by project — by year. "I keep everything from 2018 in one corner. Everything from 2022 in another. I like knowing where things come from in time." Surface Memory pulls from every corner of that studio. There's packaging from a move she made in 2019. A receipt from a bookstore in Fort Kochi, 2016. A bus map from a residency in Portugal that never happened. These fragments are layered, scanned, composited, and printed using a process that preserves the paper texture, the crease marks, the evidence of handling. The result is garments that feel like they've been somewhere — artifacts of a life lived in accumulation.