A mangrove root — a tangled heap sculpted out of paper — sits idly in the centre of the Durbar Hall Art Gallery, where artist Bindhi Rajagopal’s exhibition, The Grounded Guardians, is underway. An uncanny object yet not unfamiliar, one may wonder. But before they could contemplate it any further, their eyes are pulled elsewhere.
To the walls, where several artworks are neatly displayed, each, in ways of their own, articulate the wonders and wanes of exactly what they had just overlooked — mangroves.
Just like Bindhi had, all those years ago.
This exhibition, whose tagline reads, A Meditation on Mangrove Roots, is then a callback, a recollection for Bindhi, for whom these shrubs that littered the brackish waters in Kochi, her hometown, were once a familiar sight. These swirling, curling roots were always there, according to her, until they were not.
It was a truth that she had barely paid attention to. Not for many years. Not until 2018, when, while teaching at an architectural school, Bindhi stumbled upon a lecture that talked about, among other things, mangroves, and how they were instrumental in the collective fight against climate change.
“It was right after the deluge of 2018, and a few foreign scientists had visited the college to take a class on climate change. No doubt, the lecture was a nudge to return once again to the roots,” Bindhi tells TNIE.
“I remember clearly, back then, buildings were sparse, and trees and wetlands were more common in Kochi. Mangrove roots were always above ground, visible and hypnotic due to the interconnected patterns they create,” she says.
“It is an ecosystem, home to birds, insects, and animals. The mangrove protects everything in its reach, keeps the land together. Like mothers. That’s the first image that rushed to my mind during the lecture,” Bindhi adds.
This image steered her in the years to come, in her artistic endeavours. Every time she picked up a brush, the memory yearned to seep into the canvas, bleed into the colours.
“It’s like a poem or a story that refuses to leave you behind. You just have to write it. For me, mangroves are something that I just have to paint. There’s no other option.”
Every work that Bindhi has done since has some element of mangrove in it, if not explicitly, then certainly, abstractly.
The Grounded Guardians, the artist’s first solo exhibition since 2018, is a compilation of all these works and has been eight years in the making. “It’s been a long time, I know. There were the floods, then Covid. Now, after a long break, I have enough paintings to hold a solo exhibition,” Bindhi smiles.
The artist had lost several of her works during the deluge. Even more was given away to aid fundraising and help those who have lost their home in the floods.
Even then, 25 works — 24 from the current series and one from her previous exhibition at Florence Biennale — adorn the walls of Durbar Hall Art Gallery, inviting the public to see that which they had inadvertently overlooked, to introspect, and even imagine.
As for the mangrove sculpture, Bindhi says, “It’s for those who don’t yet know what a mangrove looks like.” For, indeed, the paintings can never quite tell the complete picture, can it? Only fragments. Only what’s needed. They tease an idea, conjure an emotion, draw the beholder into the complex puzzle that his web of mangrove roots invariably is.
Bindhi’s affinity is not limited to just mangroves, of course. Her own cats and a plethora of animals, too, feature in her works. The inspiration: the recent human-wild animal conflict on Kerala’s forest fringes.
“It’s man-made, isn’t it?” she asks. “We took away their home and reduced the forest where they grazed, hunted and scavenged. They are just walking the same path as always, where we have encroached and constructed buildings,” Bindhi elaborates.
“This place is for all of us — the mangroves, the animals, and also us. We don’t have ownership of the Earth. That’s what I intend to convey, the message of my works,” Bindhi signs off.
