Tanvi Kant is an interdisciplinary artist who repurposes textiles through elemental hand-construction techniques by unpicking, wrapping, coiling, knotting, and stitching sculptural textile forms. She makes textile jewellery, sculpture, tactile participatory installations and collage.
Working with reclaimed saris, dressmaking off-cuts and unwanted textiles sourced from local tailors and her circle of family and friends; fabrics imbued with private and collective socio-cultural histories are transformed into abstracted organic forms for hybrid identities to emerge.
Embodied movements when working with materials and sensory stimulation of tactility, colour and visual play are explored through organic structural forms that are sensitive to spiritual, folk and cultural heritage.
Recollections of experiences from her British-Gujarati upbringing draw on personal memories of rituals, adornment, food-making and language. They resurface as signifiers of cultural and bodily memory synthesising the personal and the universal.
Tanvi has extensive experience as a tutor in adult education to postgraduate degree level. She regularly works with the public and community groups encouraging participants to respond to their visual and tactile senses through materials and to support intergenerational learning experiences.
Tanvi is based on the South East coast, UK and graduated in 2005. She has won numerous awards and exhibited internationally. Her work is part of the public collection at Touchstones Museum and Art Gallery, Lancashire UK.