BENGALURU: A Good book can stay with you long after you turn over its last page. And a well-crafted novel can often be a muse to many. It certainly is for Anuradha Bhaumick, an embroidery artist from Bengaluru, whose latest series is called Booked For Life. Here, the 29-year-old uses various stitches in time to make a piece of art that is inspired by the books that left an impression on her. Calling it her tribute to the authors, Bhaumick says, “My Booked For Life series came from a desire to re-read books. I was unable to read in the years before this with my 9-5 job, I used to spend whatever time I had left after work to do absolutely nothing. It’s not that people who have corporate jobs don’t read, I was just lazy.
I am making up for the lost time and getting inspired by all the books that I am choosing to revisit.” The embroidery artiste kickstarted her series with a James Baldwin piece, which was done on a 10”x10” canvas. Why did she pick this particular writer to begin with? “The first book of his I read was The Fire Next Time in 2014. In this book, Baldwin writes a letter to his nephew narrating his experiences with racism and religion during the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement in America.
During the same time, my sister had her new born son in the US, and I felt like this was universe’s way of introducing me to a guru who had the right advice for me at the right time,” says Bhaumick, who left her job as a denim designer in 2020 tobecome a full-time embroidery artiste. The next book in the series was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Instead of one piece, this tribute was divided into four, and the canvases were sized at 5”x5”. Unravelling Bhaumick’s love for embroidery would take you back to when she was five and started learning this skill during a bout of chicken pox.
But despite the various knots life threw her way, embroidery was always there to calm her down. “I preferred if life was going at 5x speed. Without embroidery, I would be a very angry and frustrated person. It’s my therapy,” she explains. The process even ins tille d new traits in her. Patience is one of the most visible ones and is evident in the intricate details in her work. Take, for instance, the James Baldwin piece, where even the book titles have been embroidered on the spines of the novels. “My pieces take anywhere between 30 hours to 150 hours to make.
The longest I have spent on an embroidery is 150 hours and it is the James Baldwin piece,” she says. The series is an ongoing one, where she will create something inspired by a book as and when she re-reads it. Possible new additions include Marjane Satrapi, Arundhat i Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri and Haruki Murakami. The works can be viewed on her Instagram (@hooplaback. girl) and can be bought from her Etsy shop