Wearing the Landscape

Anshu Arora is a multidisciplinary design practitioner. She moonlights between fashion, space design and crafts. She is Co-founder and design partner at Small Shop ( Jason & Anshu). She consults with artisan groups and organisations filling design gaps based on their ask. Some of these are commissioned projects, others have become mutually enriching relationships. All of them inform her process and Practice.

For Anshu design is a an act of finding solutions together. She believes that empathetic design can contribute to creating new ways of seeing the familiar. Working closely with artisans, understanding techniques, artisanal production systems, their limitations, strengths and collaboratively finding solutions is deeply satisfying for Anshu.

The act of re-presenting this vast and endless body of work is critical to building true appreciation towards the poetics that inform the processes and products, together with stories of people who make them.

Sushma came into the world of cotton as a filmmaker interested in understanding the complex story of India’s handloom industry. A chance encounter with a single farmer growing naturally brown coloured cotton in a discreet village in Karnataka changed everything. Udaanta Trust emerged in response to a cotton economy shaped by ecological decline and uncertain livelihoods. Today, brand Kandu is a land to loom initiative that stands as a testament to the revival, resistance and resilience of a natural fibre grown and woven with social, economic, and ecological integrity. More than a textile, Kandu offers an alternative way forward where agriculture, craft and commerce work together to regenerate both landscapes and livelihoods — local in ambition, global in impact.

Nisha Subramaniam is the co-founder of Kullvi Whims, a social enterprise based in Himachal Pradesh, India. For the past fourteen years, she has worked with the Gaddi pastoral community and traditional women artisans to establish a sustainable value chain for indigenous wool — connecting shepherds, spinners, dyers, and weavers into a circular economy. In this process, she has trained and built local capacity in natural dyeing, a practice that had nearly disappeared, while drawing on the community’s rich skills and traditional knowledge to create alternate livelihoods.

Alongside running Kullvi Whims, Nisha is pursuing a Master’s in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University, Canada, bringing a futures lens to her practice. Her work explores how foresight, sustainability, and indigenous knowledge can come together to shape resilient and equitable futures for craft-based communities.

Guided by a curiosity for natural materials and a commitment to slow, intentional making, Jenny Pinto founded Oorjaa in 1998. Beginning with handmade paper crafted from banana fibre, the practice has grown into a body of work centred on sculptural, circular design.

Her approach transforms the overlooked into the essential, where material, process, and time converge to create objects that are both tactile and enduring. Each piece reflects an ongoing exploration of what waste can become.