Q+Art is a series featuring the artists behind our First Friday Exhibitions. Today, we're talking with Austin-based artist Malti B Lee, whose work is featured in our January 2026 exhibition, Lone Star: New Takes on the 28th State.
Two years ago, Malti B Lee arrived in Austin with a suitcase full of memories from London, Spain, India, and the Middle East. She had only just settled in when a downtown artist residency offered her a new way to get to know the city. For Malti, it was a chance to trace her own story across Austin’s streets, to see what parts of herself might take root in Texas soil. Born and raised in London, she talks about the feeling of home as something that sneaks up on you, sometimes in the shape of a building or a quiet corner that calls up another place, another time.
Malti's paintings draw on her ongoing fascination with the decorated walls and ornate, intricately carved details of Islamic and Indian architecture, the sort of designs that are rare in Austin’s landscape of neon and glass. Still, she finds them, sometimes in the most unlikely places, tucked into the corners of buildings meant to echo European styles. Seeing Local Imprints, her body of work from this period, is like rounding a corner in Austin and suddenly catching a spatter of London rain, a glimpse of a Moroccan archway, or a whiff of the flower markets in Jaipur. For Malti, placemaking isn’t just about architecture but the sights and smells of memory, longing, and homesickness.
Not long after the residency, Malti learned she was pregnant with her first child. The limits of pregnancy nudged her toward new materials—textiles, embroidery, a journal balanced on her lap—art she could make while curled up on the sofa. Waiting for her baby, she learned maedeup, the Korean art of knot-tying, planning to mark her child’s first hundred days with colorful cords and a daily note. In these imagined knots and future scribbles, Malti started to imagine what home might mean for both of them.
In Today’s Q+Art Interview…
Malti B Lee discusses the ins and outs of her Austin residency, the opulent architecture of Islam and India, and the intriguing parallels she draws between architecture and embroidery.
Did the residency in Austin have any specific parameters? Were there any guidelines around what sort of work you were supposed to be making?
Malti B Lee: It was very much inspired by downtown Austin. It’s sponsored by the Downtown Austin Alliance Foundation. We had a studio in downtown, and it was very much about activating downtown Austin, which has… let’s say, a lot of empty spaces. And so they’re trying to activate it more and bring in more people, I think, as well. There’s a big homeless population that is concentrated in downtown Austin. Parking is difficult, so infrastructure is always quite hard. And so I think people tend to go to other parts of Austin, and Austin is pretty small in the grand scheme of cities. But that was sort of the parameters of the residency, which is why it appealed to me, to be perfectly frank, as well.
Did you take reference photos or sketches for your work during the residency?
MBL: The first week was definitely me just walking around and just really soaking in because I’d only spent time in downtown Austin really in the evenings, which is when you’d go to restaurants and bars and things. But I hadn’t really spent much time in the daytime in downtown Austin apart from when I first arrived. So it was really nice to just sort of walk around and see a very different crowd in the daytime as well. So I had a camera in hand, and it was pretty cold at the time, because it was January… doing a lot of walking, taking pictures, a few sketches here and there. Just to see what caught my eye, I guess, and how I wanted the residency to shape up.
What inspired your ‘Remnants of Forgotten Histories’ collection?
MBL: That collection is specifically inspired by Islamic and Indian architecture, with the very ornate, intricately carved, and decorated walls you find in that style. And that really spans my experiences across southern Spain, northern Africa, the Middle East, and India. So I lived in the south of Spain for some time. I’ve lived in the Middle East, and growing up, we’d spend a lot of time in India. Those places really connected together for me, and it was something I was missing in the United States, to be perfectly honest.
How did your pregnancy influence your current work and creative process?
MBL: With everything happening, actually sitting with it for a while, it felt very natural after the hail damage because the mentorship program started, the hail damage, and then the physical constraints that were put on me, I was like, okay, I’ve been pushed to stop almost what I was doing and take that space and time. That’s when I really started thinking about this baby… what does their cultural inheritance look like? Because I’m British Indian, my husband’s Korean American, so this baby is a function of these four very different countries, culturally as well. It was about starting to think about those ideas and how we’re going to share that richness with our child.
You worked with traditional Korean knot tying after learning you were pregnant. Can you tell us about that?
MBL: I took a class in a traditional Korean knot-tying technique called maedeup. The project I had in mind was to write a little something about what I want to remember each day for the first 100 days after the baby is born, which is significant in Korean culture. Then I’d pick a color of cord and tie some sort of knots. Every day is something different… the colors reflect what I want to remember that day: if it’s joyful, or about going out. I have all these knots, and I write a little something every day just for me.
It sounds like your practice has a strong connection between personal story and process, even as your life shifts. Do you see a common thread in all your work?
MBL: I actually very much agree with this. When I was thinking about what I wanted to learn while I was in Korea… this knot-tying, I was particularly drawn to for its physicality… but also, it was the lines. I love lines. I can just trace these lines and draw them, and it feels very similar to the architectural line—I like line work, let’s face it, and even the sewing and embroidery, very similar line work goes into that as well. So it feels like all these elements have sort of come together almost unintentionally.
View ‘Lone Star: New Takes on the 28th State’
Our January 2026 First Friday Exhibition features work by Malti B Lee.
Exhibition | Curator’s Statement | First Friday Exhibitions
Follow Malti B Lee
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. All photos published with permission of Malti B Lee; featured artwork: “In Your Hands” (detail).