At Lalit Kala Akademi Kalyani Pramod translates photographs into textile art

When I walk into textile artist Kalyani Pramod’s Chennai studio, she is sipping tea, surrounded by framed textile and paper works and photographs arranged carefully around the room. They are ready to be packed and sent to Lalit Kala Akademi, the venue for her ongoing exhibition, Tribute to My Father, a personal homage to her father, the late photojournalist TS Nagarajan.

“We were rich not through money but rich through experiences,” Kalyani says, reflecting on a childhood shaped by immersion in the arts. From the age of seven, she travelled across the country with her father, accompanying him to exhibitions and on assignments that placed her inside a world of photographers, dancers and artists. “I think I’ve become a designer because of him and his friends. We had artists of different kinds coming home, and it opened to me a new world,” she says. 

For the exhibition, she has selected a few of her father’s photographs from the negatives she has preserved and digitised over the years. Displayed alongside each image are her textile and paper interpretations — woven tapestries, miniature embroideries and delicate works on tea-stained paper that echo the original compositions. In total, 82 pieces are on display, forming a visual dialogue between photograph, thread and memory.

Among the works are woven tapestries in silk and wool, miniature black-and-white embroideries and portraits stitched onto used tea bags. The tea bags are opened and repurposed as canvas. “If you take your needle through the tea bag and you made a mistake, you can’t correct it. It just tears,” she says, describing the care the process demands.

Using tea bags as her canvas is also her way of repurposing waste. An advocate of working with discarded material, Kalyani often collects what others throw away. Piles of textile scraps and salvaged odds and ends are a familiar sight in her studio, waiting to be reimagined into art. 

Notably, Kalyani has deliberately avoided her father’s portraits of well-known personalities. Though Nagarajan photographed political figures and public names, she has chosen instead to focus on his images of everyday life, priests, vendors, women seated along the ghats, unnamed faces caught in mundane moments.

The meticulousness of her process mirrors the discipline she grew up watching. Nagarajan worked with film and believed deeply in analogue photography. She recalls how at her home, there was a darkroom where he developed his own negatives and printed his photographs himself. When the digital era arrived, he chose to stop photographing altogether. For her, that commitment to craft, to composition, timing and patience, remains a constant reference point. 

Alongside the works drawn directly from her father’s photographs is a separate series titled Banaras. Unlike the paired pieces in the main tribute, these works are not based on his images but on her own visual memory of the city. For her, Varanasi was never a distant pilgrimage site. It was a recurring landscape of childhood. “My father would take us to Varanasi because he was doing features on Varanasi, and I have vivid memories from my time there,” she says. The ghats, the colourfully painted walls, the women seated in clusters stayed with her. 

“I would like people to go back with the feeling that this existed,” she says. In choosing images of everyday life, moments that might otherwise slip into obscurity, Kalyani hopes to preserve not just her father’s archive, but a visual history of an India that feels increasingly distant. 

For an artist who has long used her practice to foreground larger concerns, from climate change to endangered species, Tribute to My Father feels both intimate and expansive. It is a daughter’s homage, certainly. But it is also an argument for looking closely, at the overlooked, the ordinary and the nearly forgotten, and recognising their worth.

Tribute to My Father is on display at Lalit Kala Akademi until February 26. 

Published – February 17, 2026 05:35 pm IST