Keepa Maskey confronts implications around body and identity through her work, exploring family relationships, neurodivergence and an intersectional feminist perspective while honouring the ancestors and the Indigenous practices of the Newah community of the Kathmandu Valley. She particularly examines these issues through textiles, moving images and performative writing, beginning with weaving and stitching in a meditative practice of engaging with material to isolate ideas and seek meaning. The act of stitching is connected to her childhood, when Maskey watched her grandmother work with the needle, and this has become a source of connection helping the artist reconcile the fact she was never accepted as a grandchild due to hierarchies of the caste system.

Recital of a Dressmaker 2024 is an ensemble of quilting, fabric manipulation and resonances of medical textiles and dressmaking. Including white cheesecloth, the material used in Nepali households as a quilt cover, Maskey’s work interrogates trauma and fear, fantasy and longing, with motifs of the Morning Glory plant which decorated the walls of her primary school, and running stitches inspired by a spider web. In Maskey’s accompanying texts and video, the web, soil and body become instruments for fluid storytelling and exploring notions of community and the self.