Dahlia aggarwal

MFA Textiles

Foveate

This thesis investigates how textiles can unsettle visual assumptions, encouraging a perceptual shift. Through weaving, upholstery, and spatial installation, the work stages a tension between what a surface appears to be and how it is encountered by the body. Through woven pattern, tactile texture, and trompe l’oeil textile surfaces, perception is something negotiated rather than fixed: the eye anticipates one reality while the hand discovers another.

Drawing on a range of sensations gathered from observing landscape formations and textures, it translates enduring scale and material qualities into an interior landscape of woven surfaces and textile-based furniture. Rather than serving as passive coverings, these textiles act as agents of bodily awareness and spatial perception. Softness here is not only comfort but a perceptual strategy that unsettles certainty, slows recognition, and invites a more embodied relation to the material world.