How chronic illness became a starting point for artistic alchemy for Koshy Brahmatmaj

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Pain is invisible; the sufferer has to make noise for it to be acknowledged, treated or accepted. Mumbai-based artist Koshy Brahmatmaj, 34, lives with chronic endometriosis, a painful condition that afflicts millions of women around the world.

A recently-concluded exhibition at Anupa Mehta Contemporary Gallery, Mumbai, of her textile-based works, titled how do i make you believe, showed how the lack of quick fix solutions to chronic illness and pain can be, among other things, a starting point for artistic alchemy.Brahmatmaj’s chosen medium is embroidery—something that social media algorithms would term “grannycore” or “slow living”, and what British embroidery artist Clare Hunter says in her book Threads of Life (2019) a way for women to express, communicate, and create meaning. The artist’s embroidered works, images of which she puts up regularly on social media, subvert the social media-fuelled aspirational lifestyle credo about handwork.

What is seen as a rebellion against turbo-charged Artificial Intelligence-efficiency that defines the age. Brahmatmaj is more concerned with an answer to this question: How do you make someone believe the pain that you can’t see? The artist says, “It comes from my own experiences of having to prove my pain while I appear functional and productive to the world.”Embroidery isn’t as peaceful or calming as it is made out to be,” she explains.

“Imagine, I am jabbing at a piece of fabric with a pointy tool over my fingers. The process becomes my expression of anger, my frustration and pain —within the limits of my body, without hurting myself or anybody else.” Over several years now that she has been diagnosed with and treated for aggressive