The Padma Code

In collaboration with Mechaniya

The Padma Code brings together a new body of works by Tanvi Ranjan, in collaboration with Mechaniya, the textile art studio she co-founded. Through Mechaniya, Tanvi expands her artistic practice into a collaborative space where textile, technology, and women’s labour intersect. The studio uses advanced knitting technology to reinterpret elements drawn from traditional Indian arts and crafts. These elements are deconstructed and rebuilt digitally, pixel by pixel, to create jacquard tapestries that connect India’s textile heritage with contemporary art. Mechaniya also functions as a space of learning and skill-building. Through the studio, Tanvi trains women from rural communities to work with jacquard design software while also developing hand techniques such as embroidery and crochet. By bringing together digital design and craft practices, she challenges long-held assumptions about what women are seen capable of mastering. In this exhibition, Tanvi turns her attention to the lotus (padma in Sanskrit), a motif that has traversed centuries of Indian art, architecture, and textile traditions, carrying layered meanings of beauty, spirituality, and renewal. Drawing from visual lineages such as Chintz, Kantha, Pichwai, Ikat, Paithani, and Madhubani, she studies how the lotus has been continually reinterpreted across regions and communities. These references are distilled into drawings and translated into knitted jacquard textiles, where the artist works within the structural logic of knitting machines and a limited palette of six yarn colours. Pixels, the smallest unit of digital patterning, become a method for blending colour and form. Across six interconnected series—Padmadhāriṇī, Padmālaṅkāra, Padmalīlā, Padmavikāsa, Padmagandha, and Padmabrahmāṇḍa—the lotus emerges as both image and algorithm: a generative structure through which traditions are translated, altered, and renewed. The Padma Code reflects on continuity and transformation, positioning textile practice as a site where cultural memory, technology, and artistic authorship converge.