How do our mothers and grandmothers spend their lives?

In To All The Women Who Came Before Me, Priyanka Singh Maharjan is noticing the time and efforts of the women around her. The ceaseless cycle of chores at home and fields, and the numerous side-hustles that follow them even during their leisure keep women busy. Their quiet labours, as indispensable as they are for life to go on in society, either go unacknowledged and uncelebrated, or are glorified and exotified. Either way, they continue working relentlessly.

As an ode to the busy, productive hands of women, Maharjan is using “women’s works” – embroidery, crochet, weaving – to explore the work of women before her and around her. Her mother looked after the house, raised two children, wove carpets and wrote loving letters, all while her father was abroad for work. Her grandmothers tended fields, raised children, took

care of the house and wove warm shawls. Her great-grandmother even taught children to read. The women around her continue to do these works, even as they step into newer, more modern roles. These details, she knows, because she has been talking to them.

Maharjan’s conversations with the women in her life – her mother, aunts, grandmothers, sisters and friends from her community – all feed the visuals of her work. To embroider, other than the literal act of sewing patterns onto fabric, also means to add exaggerated details to stories to make them more interesting. To embroider means to gossip or to loiter over “less important” details. These details – women going about their day, the objects their hands touch, the spaces they occupy, the tattoo patterns on their bodies, the food they grow – are embroidered lovingly onto fabric woven by her grandmother. Women from her community have chosen to collaborate with her. They embroider. They talk. They embroider. Processes – the movement of women’s hands and hearts – are central to this body of work.

Maharjan comes from a line of women who have worked the fields and the loom. They pick up these skills out of necessity, curiosity, or a simple need to keep their hands busy. Their idea of rest, or rather leisure or a break, is to weave. Her own mother wove carpets, not the traditional shawls of her grandmothers’ and aunts’. Here, Marharjan is also learning, exploring and intervening, and making sense of her own weaving process.

To All The Women Who Came Before Me is an invitation to notice women’s work against the changing backdrop of the city Priyanka Singh Maharjan grew up in. It is an homage to their creative labours and the intergenerational exchanges that have enabled their life-giving womanly preoccupations.