This project documents and reimagines the colonial indigo trade route from India to London through watery, submerged perspectives1. Rather than reproducing the smooth, top-down logic of colonial nautical charts, it interrupts the erasures such mapping often performs, allowing corrosion and extraction to emerge through the behaviour of indigo, rust, and water, considering how histories of trade are carried within materials themselves.2
Historically, indigo functioned as a colonial commodity closely tied to systems of capital, regulation, and imperial power, travelling along sea routes structured by coercion and control before arriving in Britain to become the “imperial blue” associated with military and labouring bodies. Through varied tie-dye and dyeing processes, the project renders this circulation materially, attending to what Christina Sharpe describes as the wake—the ongoing presence of historical violence that persists across time and space.2
Alongside indigo, rust dye operates as a second material language. Depositing across the fabric’s surface, rust textures suggest transitional zones between sea and land, ports and shipping routes, where materials shift from fluid movement to fixed systems of management and extraction. Areas of pure rust staining correspond to terrestrial infrastructures, pointing to longer histories of industrialisation and environmental transformation.
Drawing on GĂłmez-Barris countervisual methodology, the dyes are allowed to migrate, erode, and layer themselves across the textile, forming a counter-map shaped by material processes rather than geometric precision. Fragmented and difficult to read at a distance, the work asks viewers to approach closely, tracing textures and breaks. In doing so, it reflects on how mapping conventions organise perception, and how alternative material approaches might register histories that standard cartographic views tend to smooth over or omit.
