Ruby Chishti, The World is a Loose Stitch, 2024. Antique Singer sewing machine, cloth, thread, yarn, found fabrics, polyester, archival glue.
Perhaps one of the most uniting aspects of the human experience is the quality of resilience in the face of mourning. There exists no shortage of suffering in our existence, both in the individual lifetimes of people, and across mankind’s history; in spite of this, the human spirit possesses an invariable ability to continue on.
Joy and mourning; love and loss; birth and death–all these things cannot exist without the other. And so they go on, in an unending cycle of ups and downs, and we experience one, and then another, one, and then another. Ruby Chishti recognizes this. Her work is at once a celebration of what is cherished and a reverence for that which has been lost. As Chishti has faced her own fair share of hardships throughout her lifetime, her ability to channel the oppressive weight of memory into artwork that exudes such sincerity and love is something to be admired.
In her newest body of work, The World is a Loose Stitch, Chishti focuses on a motif that has permeated her practice over the years: her cloth women. Made from assemblages of stuffing and recycled pantyhose, these women are lovingly created, allowed to exist in natural shapes and poses, relaxed and resting–the hand of their maker driven by an unmistakable veneration of womanhood and the female form.
Ruby Chishti, A Thousand Flowers; Lost and Preserved I, 2021. Found frame, altered and hand modeled, recycled ceremonial clothing, foam board, thread, archival glue, wool, polyester, 65h x 38.50w x 5.50d in.
The cloth women in this new series rest on sofas, type at laptops, and even hold miniature cloth children against their shoulders. As they engage in these seemingly mundane tasks, however, they each wear their own ornate helmet, a shiny signifier of their strength. Chishti affectionately refers to these figures as her “everyday warriors.”
Her female warriors highlight the invisibility of women’s labor. By crowning them with these helmets, the power in these acts become clear. Chishti has long sought to honor the overlooked and underrepresented women who have preceded her. The homemakers, the seamstresses, and the caretakers–women are constantly supporting the world around them. When they see a tear, they patch it up; when they see a loose stitch, they sew it back together. Using a traditionally domestic medium, Chishti emphasizes the ways that invisible women’s work actually keeps the world going.
As she grew up sewing and mending her own clothes, the significance an item can hold is not lost on her. The fabric that constitutes her artworks comes from old pantyhose, secondhand ceremonial dress, or even her own wardrobe. This cycle of making something new again–and honoring the garment’s original owner–is the foundation upon which Chishti’s practice is built. She treats each scrap of fabric with the respect she would give to the individual who once wore it. She breathes new life into articles that would otherwise add to our landfills. And all of this is done with love: love for her artistic medium, love for the people around her, and love for the world she lives in.
As an immigrant herself, Chishti grapples with the idea of home as not quite a physical concept, but not exclusively a symbolic one, either. Instead, her work finds the place where “home” is both of these things at once.
In her new exhibition, The World is a Loose Stitch, “home” is a concept expressed through her women warriors, through these familiar feminine bodies, and through the community created as the sculptures engage with one another. These women are as powerful as Chishti’s previous architectural sculptures, and as comforting as the fabric that they’re made of.
This body of work is an exciting culmination of Chishti’s past practices and themes, as she asks us to improve the world around us and reminds us that home is not just one thing.
Ruby Chishti (b. 1963, Pakistan) works most frequently with unconventional mediums—her textiles are comprised of discarded fabric waste, from secondhand ceremonial wear to thrifted denim. She uses these materials to communicate—with visual urgency—themes of the ephemerality of memory, love and loss as an intrinsic element of human existence, and the sociopolitical consequences of cultural trauma.
Chishti received a BFA at the National College of Arts in Lahore; she additionally trained in sculpture at El Dorado Center in Placerville and bronze casting at Art Foundry Gallery in Sacramento. She is primarily a representational sculptor. Ruby has held residencies internationally, she has received fellowships and awards including recent VSC/Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. Her installations, sculptures, and sitespecific works have been exhibited at Asia Society Museum NY, Queens Museum, rossi & rossi Hong Kong, Aicon Gallery (London & New York), Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, India, Arco Madrid, Art Hong Kong, India Art fair and The Armory Show NYC to name a few. Chishti’s work has been published in numerous magazines and newspapers and books including Unveiling the visible by Salima Hashmi, Memory-Metaphor-Mutations by Salima Hashmi and Yashodhra Dalmia and The eye still seeks: Pakistani Contemporary Art by Salima Hashmi & Matand Khosla.
She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.