4 min readJan 17, 2026 12:56 PM IST
First published on: Jan 17, 2026 at 12:56 PM IST
The needle and thread have been used to send codes, as an espionage tool during wars, as a symbol of royalty and often in a trousseau for a mother to declare her love for her daughter. For London-based textile artist Ekta Kaul it has been her way of connecting with her identity and heritage.
It was around 2007-08 that Kaul had to shuttle between Delhi and London to care for her ailing mother. Flying in and out every other month brought questions to her mind of ‘Why am I staying here when my mother is ill in another continent?’; ‘Can home be a different country that has the potential of belonging?’ These internal dilemmas found an external expression in Kaul’s cartographic embroideries as she trailed streets and buildings on maps of Delhi and London with her needle and thread. Through drawing and the stitch, Kaul began finding the familiar in the new city, reliving memories as part of the cathartic process.
Last month, Kaul’s book Kantha: Sustainable Textiles and Mindful Making (Bloomsbury, 2024) was shortlisted for the RL Shep Memorial Book Award by the Textile Society of America, which honours the best book in the field of global cultural heritage textile studies. Her love for Kantha goes back to the legacy her mother passed on to from her grandmother, who used to live in Kolkata.
A detail of Kaul’s London Story Map
“Down the ages, arts that are practised by women have been put into this container called craft. During the time of the Renaissance, all the arts were considered on par, whether it was tapestries, murals or woodwork. Then the Industrial Revolution happened and capitalist men privileged the machine-made and faster-made products and the handmade became a ‘cottage’ industry. In my view, textile should definitely be considered art, and we should be challenging these hierarchies,” she says. She speaks of German-Jewish Anni Albers who inspired generations of artists and became the first textile artist to have a solo exhibition at the US Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the 1940s. Many of Kaul’s works are in collections across the UK, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. With numerous awards to her credit, she also holds workshops at her studio in Cockpit Arts, Bloomsbury and in local schools.
Sometimes, Kaul gathers from her walks with leaves of sycamore trees woven into the linen canvas, at other times, it’s an unpacking of the connections we often forget. And that sense of order and arrangement of the mind goes back to her childhood of having an entomologist mother and a scientist father, who instilled in her the sense of wonder, the gift of storytelling and slowness.
Textiles, therefore, have become Kaul’s way of exploring “places, history and belonging”. While most of her early works have been monochromatic, her more recent works see a dash and dip of colour. In London Story Map, her cartographic thread drawing in black stitch ants its way through the city, marking rivers, fields and gardens.
Mumbai: A Sense of Place
For Mumbai: A Sense of Place, a commissioned work for the Morgan Stanley Collection, Kaul asked, “How do you experience the city through your five senses? What are the visuals, the sounds, the fragrances and my own memories of it?” And what we see is a teal of the ocean and the red of the sunset in the work that’s nearly 3.5m tall. Kaul joins the dots of Mumbai’s hidden relationships in this work, of its mercantile history, architecture and markets through her mindful detailing. Quite like maps that communicate through lines and hues and textures and empty spaces, Kaul’s stitch, too, records terrains of the mind and the landscape of feeling.
Ekta Kaul 
A detail of Kaul’s London Story Map
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