Beginning in 2024, Rao’s Armour series includes tissue paper garments framed between two sheets of glass. The works extend Rao’s garment-making practice and her research into Japanese paper garments, kamiko, undertaken during her 2023 CCA Islands Travel Fellowship in Japan.

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Central to Rao’s garment-making practice is a story she wrote in 2019, in which a woman develops a condition of involuntary, spontaneous teleportation. Each time she teleports, a part of her body is left behind at the place of departure, leaving her fragmented. In response, the protagonist devises harness-like garments, contraptions intended to hold her together and tether her to her surroundings, preventing both disintegration and perpetual motion. These garments ultimately fail; she disperses beyond them, becoming increasingly granular. The fragile tissue paper garments were created to register this failure. Through this story, Rao addresses a fractured sense of belonging caused by global movement, gender dysphoria, and attentional dysregulation.

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The majority of the works were created in 2025 during Rao’s residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.