Tamil is one of the oldest living languages in the world, with a continuous literary and spoken tradition that dates back over 2,000 years. This hand-loomed textile is a typographic meditation on language, memory, and home. Woven over 16 continuous hours on a TC2 jacquard loom, the fabric is a composition—a part of which spells out Thangam—the Tamil word for gold—using experimental letterforms drawn from my own evolving alphabets. Each glyph is a fragment of my linguistic identity, reflecting the hybrid space I inhabit between Tamil tradition and contemporary expression. Inspired by my family's history of handloom weaving, I passed the shuttle nearly 5,000 times, allowing muscle memory and ancestral craft to guide each thread. The result is not just a fabric, but a tactile archive—one that asks what it means to wear your language, and how the act of making can become a form of preservation. The fabric stands as a symbol: just like gold, a language never erodes when it is held, spoken, and woven into the everyday.
- Design, weaving, and lettering
- Shakthi Hari N V
- Advisor
- Jennifer Cole Phillips
