CHENNAI: Adyar’s Forum Art Gallery is no stranger to the works of veteran artists like Padma Shri Thotta Tharani, Gita Hudson and AV Ilango. But for Varsha Menon, there was little excitement in bringing their masterpieces back to these walls. Tapping on her line of work as an architect and interior designer, and her immersive interest in art born from having an artist for a mother, she delivered Talking Spaces to a curious audience on Thursday combining eclectic paintings and installations with an element of home decor or furniture inspired by it. “When I design my spaces, I’m heavily influenced by art.
I don’t see it as individual mediums; I think they can complement each other beautifully. While collaborative design is not very new outside of India, in Chennai, it isn’t showcased as much as it should be. When creative minds come together, you create really unique pieces,” she points out. True to that statement, the show had paired Thotta Tharani’s Symphony series (Spring and Winter) with Varsha Menon’s (VM Design Works) glass-top table with an acrylic-on-wood interpretation of Tharani’s work;
Gita Hudson’s four-square Crimson View found a spiritual match in Shruti Omprakash’s (Drawing Hands Studio) 4 Square furniture piece both the painting and the furniture set have been designed to function in unison and as individual pieces as well; Ilango’s Jallikattu VIII and Charging Bull I and II were perfectly complemented by Sunita Yogesh’s (Sunita Yogesh Studio) Nar-Kalai, designed after the maestoso Indian
bull. “The designers are young, and the artists are well-known and revered.
So, I left the directive of the design vignette to the artist. The artists would create a piece and the designer would take inspiration from it and create a piece of furniture or interior element; so, it’s guided by the artist. Curating this was very fun and involved a lot of coordination. Everybody has their own design process and way of working; so, I just allowed them to experiment on their own terms. Freedom of design is quite rare when it comes to our profession because there are a lot of factors like budgeting, client’s needs, practicality, etc.
Not to say that the pieces on display are not practical; but, because it is a passion project for most of them, they have figured out a way to make it work,” she elaborates. And there was plenty of passion on display, be it in the art work or decor piece. It was the shared interest in lotuses that led to Kavitha Prasad painting it from “her mind’s eye” and Geeta Sriprakash to take inspiration from it for her consoles. Already a fan of Manisha Raju’s work, educationist, artist and designer Aishwarya Manivannan had no trouble interpreting the artist’s Ardhanarishwar in her DVÁ lamp piece with its hand-sculpted stone yoni and Indian walnut wood lingam to represent the “androgyny of our existence and life force (light) born from the union of Shiva and Skati”.
Raju Durshettiwar’s fascination for under-construction buildings is not only evident in his Defining Space acrylic work but also in the naked cement-metal lamps by Sharanya and Raghuveer (Studio Context + Kattada Co.). Every ensemble at the show had its own story to tell — individually and in partnership with its pairing. That’s what you get when you let creative people collaborate with their strengths, says Varsha.
“Each piece is different because that’s how designers’ mind works right? It’s unique to their own aesthetic. When you pair them with art, that brings about a whole new dimension to it,” she notes. With this curation gaining such unbridled enthusiasm from artists, designers and its consumers alike, Varsha is sure that there’ll be more of this to come. After all, one thing leads to another, doesn’t it?