Crafting Stories Between two worlds
Hello and Welcome
Hi, I’m Sameeksha Mehra, an artist and practitioner exploring craft through material, memory, and narrative.
My practice is grounded in over a decade of experience with handcrafted luxury couture jewellery in India, developed through close collaboration with artisans, makers, and experts in the field. I later studied Crafts at Konstfack University in Stockholm and have been based in Sweden since 2017, working between India and Sweden.
My work draws from lived experience, field research, and long term engagement with craft communities. Through these processes, I have developed an approach that is grounded in attentiveness to material, place, and the social contexts within which making takes place.
The Buraansh Local emerges from this trajectory as an ongoing exploration of connection. A connection of belonging to the land, to tradition, and to the craft practices that shape everyday life. It reflects a contemporary craft practice rooted in India and shaped through my experiences in Sweden, where different material cultures and ways of knowing come into dialogue.
Craft is memory held in the hand.
Growing up in India, creativity was embedded in everyday life. It was present in homes, streets, workshops, and villages, where making was part of daily rhythms and shared environments. It was not observed from a distance, but practiced through hands, time, and care.
I come from the mountainous regions of India, a landscape that continues to inform and ground my work. I recall early mornings where mist moved slowly across the hills, tea stalls opened one by one, bakeries came alive, and a carpenter began his day by the roadside. These moments formed an understanding of making as something closely tied to place and lived experience.
Within this context, craft existed in close relation to the natural environment. Materials carried the presence of the land, and objects reflected processes shaped by time, labour, and touch. These early experiences continue to inform my artistic language and my approach to material and practice.
Living in Sweden introduced another way of working. The landscape, pace, and design culture brought an emphasis on attentiveness, restraint, and clarity. Over time, my practice began to hold space for these experiences alongside those rooted in India.
From this ongoing exchange, The Buraansh Local emerged as a contemporary craft practice grounded in India and shaped through my experiences in Sweden. It functions as a platform for objects and narratives that foreground lesser known heritage Indian crafts and the artisans behind them, while creating space for contemporary interpretation.
The work centres on process, material knowledge, and the lived realities that inform each piece. It brings together different ways of knowing and making, where tradition continues to evolve through collaboration, dialogue, and mutual respect.
Why this matters now
Craft traditions today are undergoing gradual transformation, as ways of making shift and locally embedded knowledge becomes increasingly difficult to sustain across generations. These changes are often subtle, unfolding over time through altered conditions of labour, production, and value.
Within this context, my work seeks to create space for these practices to be recognised, engaged with, and carried forward in contemporary settings. I am particularly interested in how forms of making that were once integral to everyday life are repositioned within current systems of production and consumption, where they are often detached from their original contexts.
The Buraansh Local develops as a response to these conditions. It engages with craft practices through ongoing collaboration, with attention to process, authorship, and material knowledge. The intention is to situate these practices within the present while maintaining a connection to the people, places, and skills that shape them.
Each work emerges through specific relationships between maker, material, and context. In this sense, the practice is not centred on individual objects alone, but on the processes and lived experiences that inform them. It is an engagement with craft as a living and evolving field, shaped by continuity, adaptation, and care.
Color theory
Color forms an integral part of my practice and operates as a mode of perception and expression. It functions as a carrier of memory, atmosphere, and affect, shaping how I engage with material and form.
Growing up in India meant being surrounded by color in everyday contexts — within landscapes, clothing, rituals, and daily gestures. These experiences continue to inform how I sense and respond to the world, where color is understood as something lived and embodied rather than applied.
Living in Stockholm brought a heightened awareness of how color operates within spatial and emotional registers. This shift deepened my engagement with color as a material presence. Within my work, color holds associations of time, movement, and emotion, allowing for layered meanings to exist without the need for explicit articulation.
My approach engages with layering and density, where each work carries chromatic decisions shaped by lived experience, shared histories, and intuitive processes. Color becomes a means of holding multiple narratives within a single form, allowing identity to be understood as evolving and situated.
The objects I produce are intended to be encountered through surface, weight, and hue. Material and color operate together to shape how the work is perceived and experienced. In this way, each piece contributes to an ongoing exploration of continuity, transformation, and belonging.
Welcome to The Buraansh Local
Through The Buraansh Local, I invite you to engage with craft as living knowledge. To connect with the hands, materials, and stories that shape each piece.
Within every object exists time, memory, and intention. These stories move across places, generations, and cultures, quietly linking us through the act of making.
Each piece you find here is part of this ongoing conversation. Connected to a maker, a material, and a place.
Come, participate in a living practice.
Each piece begins with a maker. It continues with you.