Her mother’s daughter
The ability to speak without spelling it out” is what urged the 29-year-old Al-Qawi Nanavati to become an artist. And, of course, the urge to connect to her deceased mother. “Loss has the power to bring one back to one’s most authentic self,” she says on the sidelines of her ongoing exhibition Fragile at Latitude 28 in Delhi. She has woven threads of memories and yearning into a dark blue woven sculptural piece titled Embedded Memories. It combines three works in the series which are woven with thick yarn-like rope made from Nanavati’s mother’s clothes.
These are held together with crochet threads and sandwiched between two navy blue sheets of paper. “I then screen-printed over them in a script I created to speak to her in. All of this is to say that when someone passes away, their place in our life gets reconfigured—they don’t leave us just because they’re gone. They take a different form and live within us,” says the Mumbai-based artist, whose practice is a coming together of printmaking, drawing and painting. And a creative seance with someone precious.
This is not the first time that Nanavati has worked with her mother’s clothes. “I have been doing it for years. She is present in everything I do—conversations, clothes, moments, materials… everything. My works use my mother’s threads, clothes, and other items to keep her memory alive. I try to reconfigure them,” says the artist, who studied art in Chicago. “In this exhibition, I’ve integrated my mother’s clothing with the pulp, which I’ve used in half my works. I’ve used the cloth inside the pulp as well sandwiched woven pieces of her clothes in between the paper made from it,” Nanavati says.
Maternal memory is the underlying theme in her art. Inspired by a quote from the book Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, ‘Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was’—Nanavati says, “I often think about it and how I may have re-formed my memories of my mother by constantly dwelling on them over and over again through the years. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. One does what they can with what one has. Memories help you get through everyday life when someone close to you leaves. Naturally, one tends to make them seem like the best times there could have been,” she explains.
However, it is not just her mother Nanavati draws on for inspiration. A series of two works in the show titled A Collaboration with Nilofer is focused on her maternal aunt. “All my previous works have never had a living relative contributing to them. It felt special to work with my aunt on crochet, a skill passed down for generations in our family. It’s as if they came alive in the piece.” It has a crocheted square embedded within fabric pulp made from her mother’s and grandmother’s clothes. Nanavati is drawn to artists Zarina Hashmi and Dhruvi Acharya because of their material explorations and subjects. “I’m extremely inspired by Louise Bourgeois. Her works gave me the confidence to share myself and my story with the world,” she reveals.
This multidisciplinary artist, who enjoys working with paper and fibre in their multiple forms, extensively uses written language in her practice, especially to articulate loss. “I’ve always wanted to express my thoughts through words, but never considered myself as an eloquent writer. I wrote, but what I wrote I hid in made-up scripts and fonts, which are my medium now. It gives me comfort to know that someone can feel what I feel by seeing the work and sharing in the experience,” says Nanavati, who is currently trying to screen print using fabric as the ink itself and experimenting with the consistency of fabric pulp and screen mesh count to get the desired results.
Art came to her like an unexpected wave. “I don’t think I knew that I wanted to be who I am today many years ago. But making work is what keeps me going day to day, and it’s what made me realise this is who I wanted to be. I am forever searching for the feeling of wholeness,” she says as she runs her fingers through threads fashioned from the clothes of a beloved one.