Natasha Das

Natasha Das (b. 1984, Assam, India) lives and works between New York and India. Trained in figurative oil painting in Florence, Das later returned to Assam, where her engagement with Aari embroidery marked a quiet yet decisive shift in her practice. The turn to thread emerged intuitively—less as a departure from painting than as a return to something lived and familiar. Textile became not simply medium, but proximity, memory, and ground.

Das works primarily with Eri and Muga silks indigenous to Northeast India. Her practice is informed by the histories and conditions of these materials: Muga silk, valued for its natural gold luminosity and increasingly rare due to ecological and historical disruption; Eri silk, harvested only after the moth leaves the cocoon, shaped by a non-violent and cyclical process. These materials determine the rhythm of the work. They ask for slowness. They resist haste.

Central to her practice is the ongoing BRICKS series—modular silk works, densely stitched and structurally held. Each brick functions as a discrete unit yet acquires meaning through relation. Installed together, they generate fields of color and tension, constructing space through adjacency rather than illusion. The brick operates as both fragment and foundation—an act of holding and being held.

Das’s practice is process-led and pace-conscious. Repetition becomes a form of attention. Time is embedded in the surface. In contrast to accelerated modes of production and digital immediacy, her work insists on duration, care, and material intimacy.

Das studied painting in Florence and New York. Her work has been exhibited at the Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hunterdon Art Museum, and Gross McLeaf Gallery, Philadelphia. Her work is held in private collections across the United States, Europe, and Asia, and in public collections including the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.