NISHRA RANPURA
Artist Statement
As a textile designer from India, a creative technologist from New York, and a researcher and educator currently based in Austin, Texas, my work often finds itself exploring multidisciplinary meaning-making. Through speculative narratives, my practice surfaces interdisciplinary dialogues around the topics of embodied and crafted machines, accessible and transparent processes, multidisciplinary languages, temporalities of labor, technological futures, and material literacy. My work aims to provoke questions and facilitate conversations while creating space for shared decentralized knowledge, resisting disposability and erasure in both cultural memory and technological systems. With plural perspectives at its core, my artistic practice evolves through conversation, collaboration, and the collective shaping of ideas with the community. Interweaving the mediums of woven textiles, digital fabrication, computation, new media, music theory, and creative technology at large, my research finds its form through interactive installations, community-led workshops, and participatory repositories of stories, tools, materials, and moments. Rooted in both tradition and possibility, my creative practice, in essence, sits somewhere between what we are and what we have the potential to become.