Why every canvas is 48 by 36

Every painting in the dance series is 48 by 36 inches. People ask whether that is a rule. It is closer to a habit that became a rule: a ghagra in full spin needs about that much width to open, and a tile that reads as a tile from across a room needs to be about the size of a thumbnail. Smaller canvases make the tiles smaller, and then they stop being tiles and start being dots.

The tiles are borrowed from the ralli, the patchwork quilt that women in Sindh sew from scraps. A ralli is made of hundreds of small squares, each cut from a different piece of cloth, and no two are the same. I paint the ghagras the same way, square by square, and I let the squares escape the dress and fly into the air around it.

The size also means the paintings hang the same way everywhere. Forty-three of them side by side at Artciti looked like one long ralli.