The Guyana-born artist of Indian heritage explores how memory, myth, and oral traditions can be used to unravel colonial narratives and reclaim cultural artifacts. Drawing from European tapestries and other craft-based traditions like embroidery and weaving, she imagines a future where new mythologies are formed to celebrate and monumentalize the experiences and labor of brown women. Mattai’s great-grandparents were brought from India to Guyana, South America as indentured laborers under British colonial rule. She learned sewing, embroidering, and other techniques from her grandmothers, and with every strip of fabric she weaves into her creations, she meditates on the lives of her maternal lineage.

Here, Mattai further honors the matriarchs of her family by incorporating vintage traditional garments popular among women in the Indian subcontinent such as saris and dupattas that were once worn by her mother and grandmother into this piece. The bells once belonged to the artist’s sister and are used in dance to Ghungroo music.