Bharti Parmar was born in 1966 in Leeds, England, and studied at Coventry Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. Her parents emigrated from Gujarat, India, to England in 1962, with her father working in the textile mills of Yorkshire. This family history informs her multidisciplinary art practice, which explores memory, material culture, colonial histories, and textile traditions.
Artist Bharti Parmar was born in 1966 in Leeds, England. Her parents emigrated from Gujarat, India, to England in 1962, with her father working in the Yorkshire textile mills. This early exposure to the world of textile production—and to the larger histories of labour and migration tied to it—would become a recurrent thread in Parmar’s art, which explores intersections of materiality, memory, identity, and colonial legacy. Parmar studied Fine Art at Coventry Polytechnic (BA, 1989) and completed an MA in Fine Art Printing at the Royal College of Art, London. Her PhD thesis (University of Wolverhampton, 2009), A Grammar of Sentiment: Thinking about Sentimental Jewellery towards Making New Art about Love and Loss (examined by Professor Gen Doy, Professor of the History and Theory of Visual Culture, De Montfort University), was a wordplay on Owen Jones’s seminal design manual A Grammar of Ornament (1856) and explored the poetics of Victorian material culture. These academic investigations, rooted in emotion and material history, underpin projects like REGARD:LOVEME, an artist’s book exploring coded messages in gemstones, and Plocacosmos, a study in hairwork. Her exploration of these intimate forms revives forgotten methods of communication, focusing on the symbolic power of materials to express memory and loss. Parmar’s wider practice spans printmaking, installation, embroidery, and sculpture, often blurring boundaries between fine art and vernacular craft.
At the core of Parmar’s work lies an exploration of textiles as material and metaphor, exemplified in her solo exhibition Khadi (Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, British Textile Biennial, 2021). Centred on a multi-part installation of the same name, it featured punched drawings on khadi paper, display cabinets evoking industrial sewing tables, and a film made with Sima Gonsai. The title refers both to the hand-spun cotton cloth promoted by Gandhi as a symbol of resistance to British colonial rule and to the handmade paper—produced in India from recycled t-shirts—used as Parmar’s primary medium. By invoking both meanings of khadi, she explored the entangled histories of cotton, global labour, and postcolonial identity. The punched patterns on paper—echoing the Jacquard loom’s punch cards—link textile production to early computing. Her work reflects ‘the historical trajectories connecting industrial textile production under the British empire and the contemporary fashion industry in a globalised economy shaped by information technologies’ (SADAA Archive). This research is further documented in Professor Corinne Fowler’s book Our Island Stories: Country Walks through Colonial Britain (Penguin, 2024). In the chapter ‘The Cotton Walk’, Fowler and Parmar retrace the steps of Gandhi following his visit to Blackburn in 1931, visiting India Mill in Darwen and walking to Jubilee Tower, embodying their research through walking and psychogeography.
In the exhibition True Stories (Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 2003) Parmar undertook a critical recontextualisation of colonial-era photographs from Sir Benjamin Stone’s collection. Without altering the images, she framed them with their original captions and inscriptions—normally hidden from public view—to expose the reductive taxonomies once imposed on colonial subjects. By surfacing these archival details, Parmar offered a counter-narrative to empire, inviting viewers to perceive the sitters as complex individuals. As she explains, ‘What I found most interesting was how the identities of these individuals captured by this white man of means were essentialised through a caption [...] Through the intervention, I hoped to make a small gesture towards reinstating the multi-dimensional identities of these subjects as living, breathing people’ (Marstine 2017, p. 86).
Parmar describes herself as a visual artist and academic who subverts vernacular crafts to make political statements. While she has said she is ‘a non-practicing Hindu’ and does not see her work as overtly political, issues of cultural identity, belonging, and labour resonate throughout her oeuvre (Eckstein 2008, p. 238). Parmar’s interest in systems of meaning is also evident in her artwork Lexicon (part of Thread the Loom, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2025), where she created abstract punched drawings as visual languages. These drawings suggest symbolic vocabularies akin to hieroglyphs, inviting viewers to decode relationships between image and text, form and labour, production and emotion. Similarly, works like Warp and Weft (Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, 2021) invoke the foundational structures of textile weaving as metaphors for interconnected histories and hidden architectures of power.
Parmar’s work has featured in Exchanges (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 2022), Entangled Pasts (Royal Academy of Arts, 2024) and Thread the Loom (Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2025), as well as at the Crafts Council and Victoria and Albert Museum, among other institutions. She has also taught extensively and contributed to critical conversations around postcolonial archives, empire, and material culture. She currently sits on the Designation Scheme Panel for Arts Council England and co-edits the volume on Colour in the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles. In 2025, Parmar participated in 'Hear Here', a site-responsive podcast series hosted by Nirmal Puwar and produced by Mattering Press, recorded at Coventry Cathedral. Walking through the cathedral’s spaces, Parmar reflected on the relationship between her artistic practice and the building’s materials, architecture, and colonial histories, linking her reflections to broader narratives of fellowship, textile production, and embodied research. In the UK public domain er work is represented in the Government Art Collection and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, among others.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Bharti Parmar ]
Publications related to [Bharti Parmar ] in the Ben Uri Library