Through the centuries-old South Asian craft tradition of Phulkari, Rafia Shafiq is reviving women’s stories, migration memory and heritage, transforming embroidery into a cross-continental conversation.
There are certain crafts that resist being called craft at all. They exceed decoration and they move beyond technique. They become something harder to define, something emotional and almost spiritual in the way they hold memory. Phulkari is one of those traditions.
At first glance, it dazzles through colour alone. Crimson silks blaze against coarse handwoven cotton. Gold threads catch the light like scattered sunlight. Entire surfaces bloom into geometric gardens stitched meticulously by hand. But the true power of Phulkari reveals itself slowly. The longer one looks, the more impossible it becomes to see it merely as embroidery. It’s mesmerizing.
The craft of Phulkari truly is inheritance. It is grief stitched into cloth, celebration woven into pattern, and a mother preparing something for a daughter she hopes will one day understand the labour of love hidden within every thread. Historically practised across regions of Punjab (in both Pakistan and India), Phulkari was never simply made for display. It accompanied women through life itself – births, weddings, prayers, departures, longing, memory. In many homes, it became one of the only surviving archives of women’s inner worlds.
Long before their stories were formally documented, women embroidered them. For Rafia, this is precisely what makes Phulkari so extraordinary.
Based in Oakville, Canada, the textile artist and founder of Dhaga Art has spent the last seven years persistently reviving this intricate South Asian embroidery tradition across North America. Through more than fifty workshops hosted across the Greater Toronto Area, including collaborations with institutions such as the Textile Museum of Canada, the University of Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Burlington, Rafia has introduced audiences to a craft many are encountering for the very first time.
But the story of how she arrived here begins thousands of miles away, in Haripur Hazara in Northern Pakistan.
Rafia studied Textiles and Fibre Studies at Beaconhouse National University (BNU) in Lahore, where her fascination with South Asian textiles deepened into something more profound, a critical engagement with craft traditions and the fragile ecosystems that sustain them. During her research into Phulkari, she discovered something unsettling: many of its original techniques were slowly disappearing.
“I realised it was a craft at risk of being forgotten,” she says. “I felt compelled to revive its language.”
Determined to learn from the source rather than from books alone, she travelled to Haripur Hazara to study under women artisans who practised Phulkari for their livelihoods, carrying generations of knowledge in their hands. What she found there transformed her understanding of craft forever.
“They welcomed me with so much warmth and generosity,” she recalls. “They sat with me, taught me patiently, fed me the most delicious food and hot chai. It was one of the most unforgettable experiences I’ve ever had.”
There is tenderness in the way she speaks about these women, not as subjects of preservation, but as the true custodians of the craft.
“It’s so important to highlight grassroots artisans who are the real keepers of this language,” she says. “They taught me and because of them, I’ve been able to pass this knowledge forward and teach Phulkari here in Canada. I’m forever grateful to them.”
That idea of “passing forward” runs through everything Rafia creates. In her hands, embroidery becomes inheritance.
“Phulkari truly is a canvas of women’s dreams and aspirations,” she says, speaking about the craft.
The artist’s own work often explores memory, migration and belonging, themes shaped by her experience living between Pakistan and Canada. Through workshops, she has witnessed the astonishing ability of craft to transcend borders. Sikh women have brought ancestral Phulkari shawls inherited from grandmothers. Participants from non-South Asian backgrounds have recognised motifs that reminded them of their own cultural traditions.
“It’s always fascinating to hear their emotional connections to Phulkari,” she says. “It really does go beyond borders.”
That universality perhaps explains why her workshops resonate so powerfully. She arrives not only with embroidery hoops and thread, but with stories. Vintage shawls. Visual archives. Histories seeped into colour and motif. By the time participants begin stitching themselves, something shifts. The craft stops feeling distant or historical…it becomes intimate.
“There is something beautiful in imagining how threads travel across cultures and connect us all together,” she says. Yet behind the beauty of Dhaga Art lies a deeply personal story of grief.
After immigrating to Canada, Rafia struggled to find her footing in the textile industry. She spent her early days walking through Toronto alone, visiting museums, reaching out to artists, searching for a place within an unfamiliar landscape. Then came devastating loss. Her father fell terminally ill, and she returned to Pakistan to spend his final months beside him.
“He was my greatest supporter,” she says quietly. “Someone who listened to my ideas with patience and belief.”
It was during those conversations that the seeds of Dhaga Art were planted. “We even brainstormed names for my business together,” she remembers. “Until we finally arrived at Dhaga Art, a name that honours my cultural roots through the word dhaga, meaning thread.”
After his passing, grief nearly silenced the work entirely.
“Dhaga Art was, in a way, buried under that grief,” she says. “But over time, I gathered the pieces of my broken heart and rebuilt it.” Today, the project stands not only as an artistic practice, but as a living tribute to her father’s unflinching faith in his beloved daughter.
What makes Rafia’s work especially moving is the care with which she preserves not just the visual language of Phulkari, but its philosophy. In a confusing, soul-less era increasingly dominated by speed and machine-made production, she speaks passionately about the value of slowness.
“When people compare the price of handmade and machine-made items, they don’t always recognise the depth of craftsmanship, care and time invested in each piece,” she says.
Phulkari demands patience. Traditionally stitched from the reverse side using counted threads rather than traced patterns, it requires immense concentration and embodied knowledge. Some forms, such as Bagh, become so densely embroidered that the original cloth almost disappears beneath silk thread. Others carry rituals embedded within the process itself. Rafia is particularly fascinated by Vari da Bagh, where a grandmother traditionally begins the first stitch using yellow thread before the textile is eventually gifted to a grandson’s bride.
“In this way, the textile becomes an heirloom,” she says, “carrying the presence and labour of women across generations.” That sentence feels central not only to Phulkari, but to Rafia’s entire practice. Because what she is really preserving is not simply embroidery, it is continuity. A continuity between women across borders, between grandmothers and daughters, between Pakistan and Canada, and, between memory and survival.
As a diasporic artist, she understands the urgency of that responsibility.
“I feel a deep sense of responsibility in carrying Phulkari forward,” she says. “It allows me to stay connected to my own cultural identity while creating space for Phulkari to be recognised and appreciated.”
This year marked another milestone in that journey, with invitations to lead workshops at the Royal Ontario Museum, one of Canada’s largest cultural institutions. She is also exploring new ways to make the craft more accessible, including Phulkari kits and immersive exhibitions that combine storytelling with participation.
Still, for all the institutions, accolades and expanding recognition, the heart of Rafia’s work remains human. It lives in the quiet intimacy of thread moving through fabric and in the emotional inheritance women leave behind in cloth.
“I would want younger generations, especially within the diaspora, to feel connected to their roots and to recognize the richness of their own cultural traditions. Our crafts are full of vibrancy, storytelling, and design, and they offer a meaningful way to understand where we come from. At the same time, I think it’s important to approach these traditions with a sense of pride and curiosity. There is so much inspiration within our own cultural landscape, from Phulkari of Swat to Ajrak of Sindh, Ralli, Balochi Tanka, and Zardozi. It is time to own these beautiful crafts and create more waves for the future generations by carrying it forward and reshaping in ways that feel authentic to them.”
Header image: Direct Create