The conception and crafting of garments is a distinct project within Rujuta Rao’s artistic practice. Rao’s garments are non-binary and universal, varying in their utility and engaging audiences to determine how to wear them. Building on the ideas of fragmentation and reunification of the body across Rao’s practice, a common theme in this medium is harnessing or bondage. 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. Through this story, Rao addresses a fractured sense of belonging caused by global movement, gender dysphoria, and attentional dysregulation. Many of the garments are accompanied by photographs for the wearer to change, connecting multiple temporalities of the woman’s experience to our present. 

 

Rao first began working with garments in 2009 and returned to them in 2019, presenting series of works at Serendipity Arts Festival in 2019 and Goa Open Arts Festival in 2020. Subsequently, during her Civita Institute fellowship, Rao researched the history of linen in Central Italy in 2022. In 2023, with the CCA Islands Travel Scholarship, she studied mud-dyeing and paper garment making in Japan. As the garments continue to develop independently and within Rao’s extensive practice, they have grown into the company RUGA, enabling Rao to broaden public access to this medium through expanded production and the ability to offer a range of sizes.