Creative mending: Textile repair with artist Tanvi Kant

Bring your own fabrics or garments in need of repair to this creative mending workshop for all ages, led by artist Tanvi Kant. Tanvi has been inspired by the delicate darning repairs found in Dana Awartani’s Let Me Mend Your Broken Bones, on display as part of her current exhibition Standing by the Ruins.

Learn gentle techniques inspired by Kantha for restoring torn or worn fabrics. Kantha is a tradition practiced widely across the South Asian subcontinent where rags are layered and stitched into new forms.  

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Book a Free or Pay What You Can ticket to ensure your place. You can drop in any time between 2.00pm and 4.00pm.

Activities are suitable for complete beginners through to experienced stitchers, and for participants aged 5+ to adults. 

While you are encouraged to bring your own fabric cut offs or garments for repair, essential tools and materials will be provided. You can also bring your own sewing kit if you prefer.

Activities include individual hoop-based embroidery, layering fabrics and a collaborative stitching space.  

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Alongside learning practical skills, participants will be invited to explore how making can be a form of healing and how traditions of repair help sustain both objects and stories.  

Dana Awartani’s work explores sustainability, cultural loss and collective repair, cutting tears and holes into textiles that echo the outlines of damaged heritage buildings, then darning them with thread to transform rupture into quiet acts of care.  

Tanvi Kant’s textile practice similarly uses stitching to sustain generational stories, restore worn fabrics and reimagine cultural heritage.  

Together, these approaches open a space to explore the emotional resonance of repair and how through colour, texture and shared making, participants can reconnect with the tactile joy of embroidery and the generational memories it holds. 

Tanvi Kant is an interdisciplinary artist whose playful exploration of materials investigates memories of making held in the body. She creates tactile sculpture, participatory installations, assemblages, and jewellery using hand-construction techniques such as unpicking, wrapping, coiling, knotting, and stitching.  

Drawing on her British-Gujarati upbringing, her practice engages with cultural rituals, adornment, food-making, and language, translating lived experience into poetic visual forms. Tanvi teaches across adult and higher education and facilitates community workshops, encouraging intergenerational learning and hands-on exploration of materials.  

We have a budget available to make this event as accessible as possible – this can include further interpretation services or other access arrangements we can meet to enable you to participate. If you require access arrangements, please email programme@townereastbourne.org.uk two weeks before the event date so that we can book a service if needed.