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 textile mills of Yorkshire. 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 pursued her studies in Fine Art at Coventry Polytechnic, graduating in 1989, before completing an MA in Fine Art Printing at the Royal College of Art in London. She later earned a PhD at the University of Wolverhampton, where her research into the ‘poetics of Victorian material culture’ informed a body of work centred on 19th-century sentimental jewellery and mourning artefacts, such as hairwork and widow’s weeds. 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.
A key element of Parmar’s work is her engagement with textiles—not only as material, but as metaphor and system. This approach is embodied in her 2021 solo exhibition Khadi at the Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, part of the British Textile Biennial. At the centre was her multi-part installation of the same name, which unfolded through punched drawings on khadi paper, display cabinets echoing industrial sewing tables, and a film made in collaboration with Sima Gonsai. The title refers to the hand-spun cotton cloth promoted by Gandhi as a symbol of resistance against British colonial rule, and also to the handmade paper—produced in India from recycled t-shirts—that Parmar used as a primary medium. By invoking both meanings of khadi, she explored the entangled histories of cotton, global labour, and postcolonial identity. By punching shapes into the paper—recalling the punch cards of the Jacquard loom—Parmar draws a connection between the histories of textile production and 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).
In the 2003 exhibition True Stories at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 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’ (Critical Practice, Janet Marstine, p. 86).
Parmar describes herself as a visual artist and academic who subverts vernacular crafts to make political statements. Her thirty-year career has been defined by a sensitive yet incisive investigation into hybridity, postcolonialism, and the intimate relationship between handwork and memory. 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 (Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+, p. 238). Parmar’s interest in systems of meaning is also evident in her project Lexicon, 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 (2021, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery) invoke the foundational structures of textile weaving as metaphors for interconnected histories and hidden architectures of power.
Throughout her career, Parmar has exhibited widely in both solo and group contexts. Her work has featured in Entangled Pasts at the Royal Academy of Arts (2024), Exchanges at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2022), and at the Crafts Council, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Compton Verney, among many 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 the UK public domain, her work is represented in the Government Art Collection, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, 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