CHENNAI: Sujatha Shankar Kumar always knew that she didn’t want to do just one thing in life. Her winding journey is evident from her thematic collection of works exhibited at DakshinaChitra. The collection seamlessly weaves the ideas of space, design, art and storytelling in pleasing union. From a young age, she loved reading, writing and photography, but never considered them as professions.
Always creative with her hands, it was natural she joined NID, Ahmedabad to study design. After five years of working as a furniture designer, she moved to Chicago in 1995, to pursue an MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she combined studies in experimental filmmaking, photography and design. With a Camera in hand, she explored the city’s rivers and bridges.
“Shooting brought me closer to Chicago. I love places and what they have to tell me,” she recalls. For instance, the place where the old Fort Dearborn stood, there are metal lines marked on the road, embedded into the tar. It was fascinating to stand in a city of skyscrapers and imagine a place with only a river flowing.”
Her first college project was a themed restaurant on the banks of Chicago River, weaving its history with the space. One fine afternoon there, standing with a Nikon film camera, she took the first photograph of the river exhibited in the show. “When I looked at the print already knowing the history of Chicago, I realised that the reflections seen in the river were not like this before, and the idea of ‘Transient places’ came to me — that everything is moving, changing and transient.” thus her first collection ‘Transient Places’ took it’s form.
Moving back to Chennai in 2005, she visited the Marakkanam salt pans, and ‘Transient places’ found closure. “There is a Chinese concept of ‘li’ and ‘tse’ which mean patterns made by nature and man respectively. And in Chicago and Marakkanam, I found li and tse to be intersecting,” she explains.
Her photographs, woven with fictional tales, draw a fresh perspective — like the story of how a young boy who could not spell, and how he learns to spell from these letters hidden in the photoscapes of Marakkanam.
She often searches for patterns, creates structures and visualises geometry out of everyday objects, as seen in her collections titled ‘Topographies’.’’Each place has its own aura, and we go to new places to experience this special aura. But these days, we’re losing this quality all over the world - everything is becoming ubiquitous. Through this collection, I wanted to discover what’s special about Chennai,” she explains.
Her metaphorical verses for each photograph give life to objects – the photograph of idli vessels precariously balanced and still standing strong. “I still don’t know how it didn’t fall! I composed the frame with an existing object in the foreground, ascribing it to some mysterious power that doesn’t allow it all to fall,” she smiles.
Merging poetry and photography is the collection titled ‘Open house’ — each booklet versed with profound and quirky observations from her life. “It’s titled based on the concept of an open house, where you walk into someone’s house, and you get whiffs of things they do. So this collection is an open house into my life; you come in and get whiffs of things I do!” she quips.
Having traversed through the fields of design, art, photography, writing and even archiving, Sujatha feels that one should have integrated experiences, because everything plays off something else. “It gives you a more holistic perception of the world. So I’ve tried to do that,” she philosophises.
So what new world is Sujatha going to dive into next? “I’m working on a novel. When I was in Chicago, I would take the train every day for an hour’s journey. And I used to see so many people looking tired and bored.
So I played on the idea of what if a guy, who’s tired of his life, sits on the train and writes a diary every day. He leaves the diary and disappears... His wife finds it, and her perspective is different; there’s a third character, the train conductor, who has his own perspective. It’s a three part-story, and I’m still working on it,” she says.
Sujatha Shankar’s works are on exhibit at DakshinChitra from 10 am to 6 pm till August 30. For details call: 27472603