The lotus, padma, has long served as a fluid carrier of cultural exchange. A symbol of beauty or spiritual depth, it is a recurring visual code: reinterpreted, reframed, and recontextualised through centuries of textile practice. For its inaugural collection, Mechaniya engages with the padma as a generative form in their jacquard explorations.

In this exhibition, yarn cones, crochet pieces, sketches, pixel drafts, software screens, design archives - both new and handed-down, are reminders of labour and logic, and code and care, offering a window into their processes. With these objects in the space, Mechaniya situates its practice within a continuum of industrial design, cultural memory, and community empowerment.

Unfolding as a six-part exploration of the lotus (padma), each series reimagines the lotus through a distinct Indian textile or visual art tradition, translating its visual grammar into contemporary abstraction. These are Chintz, Kantha, Pichwai, Paithani, Ikat, and Madhubani. The corresponding titles derived from Sanskrit - Padmadhāriṇī, Padmālaṅkāra, Padmalīlā, Padmavikāsa, Padmagandha, and Padmabrahmāṇḍa - form an interlinked vocabulary of devotion, ornamentation, transformation, and cosmology.

The Padma Code proposes that the loom and the computer, the artisan and the algorithm, are not opposites but co-authors. In this shared circuitry of mind and machine, the lotus blooms once again - not as motif, instead as method.