Meera Sethi: A Brief History of Wear

This mid-career retrospective brings together, for the first time, a diverse collection of work by Meera Sethi, including painting, drawing, collage, soft sculpture, performance, and illustration. Spanning fifteen years, A Brief History of Wear offers a comprehensive look at Sethi’s creative evolution and how she challenges conventional notions of identity and representation. In doing so, she honours the profound emotional, physical, and intellectual labour of racialized people.

As seen in Articles of Clothing, New Clothing Care Symbols, and Cotton Exchange, Sethi’s multidisciplinary approach examines the power dynamics of cloth—its creation, use, and eventual discarding. In contrast to the ideals of fast fashion, Sethi’s practice embraces a slow and thoughtful approach, allowing space for questioning, documenting, and meaning-making to shape the creative process.

Sethi’s inventive use of materials highlights the political and material dimensions of South Asian experiences over time. Large paintings on paper and canvas, such as those from the Upping the Aunty and Firangi Rang Barangi series, demonstrate a fearless use of colour and bold patterning. Other works incorporate collage techniques, visible stitching, and a range of materials such as plastic, paper, and hair. In Outerwhere, the winter coat becomes a canvas upon which the artist integrates these elements, creating both personal and broader cultural narratives in the process. These material strategies allow Sethi to explore how we understand and value the self, the body, and clothing within specific cultural contexts.

As a trailblazer in the development of a queer diasporic aesthetic, Sethi’s practice continually seeks to unsettle itself, posing important questions about displacement, desire, and resilience. In Begum, Sethi’s figures embrace play and excess to challenge dominant gender ideologies. Here, queerness and fashion are understood and employed as strategies of resistance against conformity.

In all her work, Sethi’s artistry, with its meticulous detail, invites us to appreciate its beauty while reflecting on the healing potential of combining intellect, skill, and emotion, mind, hand, and heart.

Image credits:
1: Meera Sethi, Shakuntalabai, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 91.4 cm x 91.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
2: Meera Sethi, Outerwhere, installation view at Cambridge Art Galleries, Queen’s Square, 2023. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.