A bloom for their thoughts
It was monsoons in Delhi, but within the walls of Bikaner House’s main building, it has been spring this past week. The Delhi Contemporary Art Week which returned for its seventh edition, was marked by blooms—literal and metaphorical — as dainty flowers strung together themes of identity and migration, urbanisation and environment, and everyday existence.
Moments after entering the venue, a Prussian blue canvas at the end of the left corridor beckons. The piece is by Rashmi Mala. It is titled Ground VI. Closer inspection reveals a green leafy twig bearing clusters of tiny white flowers; besides it is a woodier, shadowy replica of the image. The branch looks delicate; the story behind it, however, is anything but.
Painted during a residency in Maharashtra’s Alibaug in 2022, the work is a fruit of the artist’s long-standing interest in botany and subsequent ecological investigation. “I paint ground plants. My art is a form of documentation. This is why the images are not stylised but realistic; they are created using cyanotype and are the exact shape and size as the original plants,” says Rashmi Mala, adding, “My art looks at the injustice humans do to the environment, but not in a complicated way. I try to address issues of the ground from the ground.”
In Sachin George Sebastian’s paper sculpture Co-existence of Two Truths in One Space, the ground converges, and with it, everything that it bears—buildings, plants, animals—within the realm of a single flower. The 2023 work is from the artist’s Duality series and offers a fisheye view of a city.
“When I started out, I wanted to talk about urbanisation, but I didn’t want to look at the city in negative light. People come to big cities with big dreams. I, too, came from Kerala to Delhi. Now I am in Bengaluru,” the 39-year-old artist says. The city has overwhelmed him since then. His perspective is changing. The sculpture perceives the city as a carnivorous plant that devours everything and everyone that comes to it. “With my Duality series, I emphasise on the need for balance, between the city and nature, or on a personal level, between life and work. The idea behind using white paper is to induce a sense of calmness in the viewer.”
Then there is The Garden by Shailesh BR, a collage of different elements taken from his garden. The work is playful and intriguing in equal parts. It is a busy piece: there’s a watermelon, a bed of herbs, a frog, an aubergine, a corn, a radish, a carrot; the most arresting image, however, is of a pair of sunflowers, one each in full- and half-bloom stages. Shailesh explains: “The sunflowers in my garden are from seeds I got from South Korea.
Interestingly, they don’t follow the Indian sun. They still bloom and droop according to Korean time, which I find quite amusing.” The collages, Shailesh says, are inspired by works of artists Benode Behari Mukherjee and French master Henri Matisse, whose canvases depict an unravelled mind. “You can say it is like writing in a diary,” he adds.
If Shailesh is a chronicler of eccentric seeds, common vegetables and garden flowers, Sonia Mehra-Chawla is a scientist of paint. Vital to Life, created during her time in Scotland is an examination of the diatom (an algae) in the North Sea under a microscope. She pairs the microphotographs alongside her etchings and engravings.
“My practice lies in the intersection of science and art. I like to invite the audience to answer questions that I play with in my works: What is the human role in the larger ecosystem? What is life? Can micro life reflect macro life?” she wonders. Apparently, micro life can. Look closely and intently, the yellow-brown patterns in some of the microphotographs resemble flower petals.
Questions about life are central also to Indian-American artist Gunjan Kumar’s Sifr (Islamic term for zero) series. Her research in ancient cave paintings is reflected in her sculptural pieces. They give form to Time through miniature cones, which when put together take form, if you may, of a flower. Kumar, insists that the renderings are “deeply subjective and readily open-ended”.
“The core performance in all the works is to whirl matter dervish-like to make a conical form. The works are a foray into the idea of non-duality, particularly the ‘not two-ness’ between space and form that exist within and outside each other in equal fervour,” she explains.
It is not art if it is not open to interpretations.
Looking at the world through flower-tinted glasses is one way of putting it on a wall.