BENGALURU: For artist Indu Antony, embroidery is a meditative process. So one day, when she decided to sew a strand of hair onto a piece of cloth, it just felt right. Having arrived at a medium she could express herself with, the artist who delves into subjects that are connected to memory, stitches with hair on paper, cloth and even photographs.
Living by herself during the lockdown, Indu chanced upon a box containing trinkets associated with various memories in her life. She knew what to do and in a maiden attempt, Indu sowed each object onto a canvas using a single strand of her hair. As many as 39 objects with notes accompanying them found a place in her new ‘orma petty’ which has taken the form of a box book, her latest project, titled Why can’t bras have buttons?
“Because I was living alone during the lockdown, the sense of touch which is otherwise quite healing wasn’t there. So I started digging into the things in my memory boxes which I have maintained since a very young age. Having grown up in Dubai, there was always this concept of packing the ‘petty’ whenever we were flying down to Kerala. The ‘petty’ contained all the gifts to relatives and there would be a ceremonial opening of the luggage when all the cousins, aunts and uncles would gather.
I had a big fascination for the ‘petty’ but there was no one giving me gifts. So I started collecting small things on my own which would go into my ‘petty’. When I started stitching them, it just felt real and calming. It almost became my coping mechanism from the anxiety,” says Indu on the self-financed project.
Initially conceived as standalone frames, each stitched object in the book has come a full circle with each leaf complied in a box made of kora cloth. “I was not okay with any of the objects being outside the box, they had to only exist in a ‘petty’. None of them has meaning out of it. Regarding the material used for the book, I was particular that it should have a cloth cover because most of the packages transported in the train back in the day were covered with a coarse kora cloth.
These railway packages are also a kind of ‘petty’. The book comes inside another pack which has a wax seal on it. Even the paper was sourced from Delhi. Hence, I was very particular that the book has an experiential feel to it,” adds Indu, a Thrissur native currently based in Bengaluru.
With 300 copies with only 30 special editions containing one original object each, Why can’t bras have buttons? has been brought out by Mazhi Books, Indu’s own art publication house.