The warm embrace is a wall hanging by Suchitra Mattai assembled from a mixture of found fabrics, vintage saris, ghungroo bells, and a feather boa. The saris and ghungroo bells relate to Mattai’s heritage as an Indo-Caribbean woman, referencing the generations of women in her family who left South Asia to work as indentured servants in the Caribbean after slavery was abolished. Mattai uses materials in her works that possess embedded meanings in order to create a call and response between the materials and other conceptual or aesthetic aspects of the work. While the vintage elements connect the work to a long and often painful history, the found fabrics and feather boa express the joy and freedom that Mattai experiences now. “I say I’m a storyteller,” says Mattai, “but the story does not only come from history. When you’re thinking about what constitutes memory, it’s part truth and it’s part myth. These sari pieces become a way of connecting women of the South Asian diaspora over time, because they’re of different vintages. Being part of a diaspora community, you want to connect back to this past you no longer occupy, or have tangible evidence of.”