Fat woolly worms made from plastic pistils and fabric swatches. Thickets of venous networks connected to serpentine threads. Upon this creepy crawlies do the balancing act. Does one grasshopper balance a gigantic brain? Thick 2D and 3D coral strands. Or leafless trees in autumn? Flowers bloom in spring. Patches of tulle. Jaali (net). Battalions of red threads… like gashes on the skin from which blood has trickled, collected at the bottom and dried…
Pranati Panda puts the above elements of art, nature, life and haberdashery into circular frames, embroidery hoops and vitrines for her solo show titled Speaking Threads. Peering into these many windows is like viewing through a microscope as the elements appear amoebic and pulsating within these worlds of their own. Occasionally, you might catch yourself dancing with the viewing distance. Either getting nose close to study the porosity of the embroidered and the painted forms or moving away to take note of the macrocosms forming a mini-universe.
But these pretty, yet seemingly abstract themes are not easy to read. Their answers lie in their materiality – the meeting of thread and jaali – evident especially in two larger-than-life ‘brain’ sculptures nestled in shadowy cave-like spaces of solitudes, like garbhagrihas. This Panda’s version of purusha (man) and prakruti (nature). For her, the thread represents feminine energy. Soft, adaptable, every ready to stitch wounds, bind books and unite the torn, but easy to cut and fade. The tough, resilient net becomes masculine energy. Sturdy, not easy to bend, break or change, protective like a shield but porous enough to let the light and the thread get in. “One cannot live without the other and needs the other to grow,” explains Panda, who holds an MFA from Delhi College of Art.
Red, for her, is fiery, visceral and life-giving, and objects that typify a Bengali woman (sindoor, tikka, pola or red bangles, lal paar sari). Even now, she wears at least a hint of red every day. “My mother used to say it attracts your soul mate,” she reveals with a coy smile, already having found hers in husband and artist Jagannath Panda. But red also evokes zen. It is why she’s up by 5:00 am daily to catch the burning dawn, bathe in its hues and meditate in its energies, like a phoenix emerging from the ashes… a morning ritual she’s built while recuperating from her first newborn having died from brain haemorrhage more than a decade ago. For three years, she abandoned art till she was advised to take recourse in it as a therapeutic outlet. Grasshoppers crowded her canvas in colourless hordes. “A grasshopper destroys and eats even a thing that green or beautiful... But sometimes on the premise of one thought or instance, we can change our life. For me that happened when my therapist, as a way of healing, told me, ‘Maybe your child wanted you to be an artist so he sacrificed his life.’” Hope was renewed, colour returned to her drawings, the grasshoppers took a backseat, and yoga and meditation, and a “loving husband” helped to tide the tragedy. Today she’s mother to a 12-year-old, and Speaking Threads is her first solo after 19 years.
“Since that tragedy, I became obsessed with the workings of the human brain. I want to touch it someday, attend a surgery. My own thoughts make me miserable if I don’t meditate for two days.”
Of two brains at the show, the one on the first floor stays on the mind. It hangs mid-air in radio silence, curled in a fetal position, restive... a state of mind Panda refers to work in. “The world has become so noisy, and often I wonder…am I part of that noise? When I started meditating, I started looking inward. If I feel balanced on the inside, I can maintain that synergy on the outside. I don’t create if I don’t feel that calm.”
Panda is already working on new ideas, reflective through the crochet bits in blues and greys, growing in a vitrine, which she calls, “thinking seeds that are still sprouting and I have no idea of the form they’d take.”
Till: January 15, 2020
At: Vadehra Art Gallery