In the Studio: Ruby Chishti

Ruby Chishti is a Pakistani-American artist, based in Brooklyn, NY, and a 2024 Joan Mitchell Fellow. We interviewed Chishti about her work and creative practice in March 2025.

Sewing—an act as ancient as survival itself—is my language of labor, warmth, mending, storytelling, and resistance. My practice grew out of my way of living, shaped by necessity and resistance.

I collect the forgotten—fallen twigs, rejected clothing, straw, fabric scraps—each fragment carrying a history, each stitch holding a memory. I set rules for myself, only to bend and break them, experimenting with form and style. Inspiration, when it follows every impulse blindly, is not freedom but a kind of slavery.

I create works that confront the fragility of being, asking existential questions of human fallibility, love, and loss. An autobiographer at heart, I attempt to tell my story as a universal story—a meditation on belonging, on my place in the world. My work speaks in a collective voice, a language that seeks connection.

From the rejected clothing of unknown people, I construct communal, collective monuments—an act of remembrance, a reaching toward those I have never met and those I have loved and lost. These memorials accumulate like layers of history, the stratigraphy of cloth mirroring deep time—like geological formations shaped over billions of years.

Discarded, mass-produced garments hold within them traces of interdependence—how we see, touch, and feel the world, how we rely on others, both near and far, how presence and absence shape our lived experience.

Through the dismantling and reconfiguring of found clothing, I create evocative structures that invite reflection on our emotional and physical connections to space, to each other. These narratives critique patriarchal structures and systems of exclusion, challenging rigid boundaries between artistic mediums and societal constructs. By unraveling and reassembling, my work collapses distinctions—between craft and monument, between personal and collective memory.

Hand-sewing thousands of layers of discarded material, I resist hierarchies, honor complexity, and embrace the weight of history. In an age of environmental reckoning, I transform waste into testimony—an insistence that even what is cast aside holds value.

My practice is rooted in my background as a student of Punjabi literature, influenced by the Sufi poets who, with humility and reverence, adopted the female voice to challenge entrenched norms. Born as the fourth daughter in a patriarchal society, I know what it means to be overlooked, to carve meaning from silence, to assert an existence the world does not readily acknowledge.

I want my work to invite touch, to awaken recognition, to make visible the unseen forces that shape our world. How do we honor the labor and resilience of those history has ignored? How do we shift our perspective to value the invisible threads that bind us?

Whether I sculpt the form of a human, an animal, a machine—whatever I make—I seek to evoke the fragile, luminous existence that connects us all.

Mortality has shaped how I see the world—it lingers in the way I perceive, collect, and create. My work is my language, the only way I know how to connect across time and space. I find meaning in objects arranged just so, in overlooked gestures, in stories that never found expression but continue to exist, sometimes with a magnitude too great to contain.

I am, by nature, a loner—moving through the world with an insatiable need to connect, yet always at a distance. Silence has been my companion, solitude my refuge. But within this quiet, there is a deep yearning—to reach, to understand, to weave myself into something larger.

Art is my bridge, my voice when words fail. Through my hands, through thread and fabric, I speak. In the act of making, I feel closest to humanity—to the unseen, the unheard, the forgotten. I create not just to be understood, but to understand—to dissolve the distance, even for a moment, between myself and the world.

Before coming to the U.S., I spent 11 years as a caregiver for my mother, who was paralyzed in an accident. That experience transformed my relationship with time—revealing its weight, its cycles of care, loss, and resilience. I find echoes of this endurance everywhere: in the posture of a person navigating hardship, in the architecture that holds history within its walls, in the unseen labor that shapes our world.

I am drawn to the intersections of architectural ornamentation and ceremonial garments, to the parallels between the human body and built structures. What is the difference between unrecognized labor and work deemed valuable? How do we honor those who have shaped our world without acknowledgment?

My studio is a space where I lose myself in ideas, memories, and language—for what truly matters is not just what happens, but how it is remembered and the meaning we give to remembrance, love, and loss.

My studio has never been a fixed place—it exists wherever I am. No matter how small the space, I transform it into my creative world. I am fortunate to divide my time between Brooklyn and Lake Peekskill, moving between the energy of the city and the solitude of nature.

For a long time, without a proper studio, I learned to create in fragments, always carrying a needle, thread, and scraps of fabric—pieces of material that travel with me, waiting to take new shape. Discarded clothing holds immense meaning for me; it is a world of its own.

I collect what others discard—bags upon bags of forgotten remnants. Even after sweeping the floor, I gather the smallest threads, saving them as if they were artifacts of lost stories. Friends and acquaintances bring me their worn garments, and I spend time studying their textures, tracing their histories, sketching and imagining new forms.

My process is fluid, a dialogue between idea, material, and discovery. Often, it begins with a fleeting thought—an image, a feeling, a question that lingers. To capture it, I make a small sketch, not as a blueprint but as a way to hold onto the idea before it slips away.

From there, my interest deepens. Sometimes, I seek out the right materials to bring the work to life, and I do not begin until I find them. Other times, a material itself speaks to me first—its texture, its history, its possibilities—and from it, the idea emerges.

My best moments in the studio happen when something new begins and an urgency takes hold. I work across multiple pieces at once, shifting between them when I feel stuck, when one moment of creation needs space to breathe. Stepping away allows me to return with fresh eyes.

My studio is filled with unresolved works, each holding endless possibilities—some find their way into new creations, some are dismantled and reborn as something else. Nothing is ever truly finished; everything is in a state of becoming.

For example, in The World is a Loose Stitch, I transformed a sewing machine, an object of labor and creation, into something entirely new. The essence of the work remained constant, but the process of making it was one of continuous discovery. I allow space for the unexpected—for the work to take shape in ways I had not planned.

I recently had an exhibition of the same title—The World is a Loose Stitch—as an ode to the warriors that exist despite all odds. It is a place where their silent struggles and stories are celebrated and valued.

As a woman in today’s world, I navigate the constant battle of trying to be myself in a society that relentlessly sexualizes and objectifies. The superficial portrayal of women’s bodies diminishes their humanity, lowering self-esteem and reinforcing a patriarchal, sexist framework. I push against this by striving to see the human essence in women—especially older women—recognizing them as lovable beings who have endured lifelong struggles, their stories etched into their bodies.

I have recently made maquettes of ancestral figures in the form of warriors, some in clay and some with recycled cloth, each 16'' tall. These will be cast in bronze, serving as echoes from centuries past, representing the battles women have to fight to be themselves. where bit by bit we get undone by societal expectations. Where we conform and lose our identity. Where our voices are lost and forgotten.

As we navigate uncertain times, my work is fueled by a deep desire to foster empathy and dismantle prejudice. It challenges, even compels, others to think in unison. I cannot find peace in a world devoid of it. There is a profound responsibility within me to create works that draw people in—to craft experiences that feel personal, as though the stories I share are their own, lived and felt. Through evocative and immersive works, I strive to cultivate a space where understanding transcends division, and where art serves as a bridge to our shared humanity.

A project I am currently working on that relates to this desire is Warrior’s Hat. In this piece, I am hand-sewing felt and woolen fabric hats, each one carefully crafted and placed next to individuals who have given up—those lost to the margins of society. The homeless individuals on New York’s streets fight unimaginable battles every day. Small struggles become monumental when compounded by mental health challenges, poverty, and systemic exclusion. By placing a warrior’s hat next to them, I want to communicate that I see them, that they matter, that they are warriors who must not give up.

This project is born from my deep connection with New York City, which began when I first arrived in 2006. Standing in the subway, I heard the announcement for a World Trade Center-bound train—a destination that no longer existed. I searched the faces around me for traces of grief, sensing the unspoken losses and resilience that defined the city. In that moment, New York became more than a place; it became a living memory, a witness to history—one that I, too, became a part of.

The hats stand as symbols of resilience, strength, and honor, honoring the forgotten warriors who continue to fight silently against their circumstances. This project involves living with mental health challenges; a life suspended, a mind fractured, a silence I could not break. Emerging from that darkness, I found myself drawn to those who still remain in its grip—the voices that go unheard, the bodies curled in subway stations, the souls lost to a world that has cast them aside. I see them now, not as strangers, but as reflections of a time when I, too, stood on the edge.

This experience has brought me closer to those who struggle to exist in a world that moves too fast to notice them. I want to create work that speaks to this, that holds space for the vulnerable, the broken, the forgotten. I want to stitch their presence into my art, to remind the world that they are here, that they have always been here. That they are us.

At times, life feels like a loose stitch—fragile yet holding everything together. My work has grown in ways I never anticipated, shaped by the sweeping winds of time and experience. With my upcoming solo exhibition at Rohtas 2 in Lahore, Pakistan, held in conjunction with the Lahore Literary Festival, I hope to engage in meaningful conversations with art students, educators, institutions, and the public. This show will feature new works alongside ones recently shown in the Brooklyn Artist Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. I am also participating in The Golden Thread Part 2, organized by BravinLee projects, a fiber arts exhibition taking place from April 10 to May 16, 2025, at a historic building in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport.

Receiving the Joan Mitchell Fellowship has reinforced my existence in ways I never imagined. It has provided a framework of support, offering strength and the possibility of realizing dreams that once felt distant—particularly my long-held ambition to create large-scale sculptures for public spaces. Having worked on large-scale commissions in Pakistan after graduating, I dream of creating monumental works that exist in shared spaces here—works that stand as markers of resilience and collective memory. I have been sketching, drawing, and building maquettes, shaping ideas that have lived within me for years into tangible possibilities.

Interview and editing by Jenny Gill. Learn more about Ruby Chishti’s work at rubychishti.com.