Mapping a Liminal: Nurturing of Kantha Into Contemporary Art

MAPPING A LIMINAL: NURTURING OF KANTHA INTO CONTEMPORARY ART.

Natasha Narain Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) Kala Bhawan, Viswa Bharati University, India.

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts

Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology, Australia.

2017 3

Keywords

• Automatic drawing, catharsis, connection, conflict, complex and hybrid identity, goddesses, interdisciplinary, kantha, material culture, memory, making a place, painting, portability, reconfigure, reflexive, reparation, restitution, sacred, South Asia, touch, transnational feminism, transcultural, tradition, textile, transformation.

Abstract

Kantha emerged as an embroidery and textile-based personal storytelling craft, anchored in women's experiences in undivided Bengal. Historical events and the increased complexities of a globalised world have altered the nature of kantha. This research examines different approaches that revitalise this tradition in contemporary practice. My project set out to discover how the conceptual and formal strategy of kantha could be reinterpreted through contemporary art in a way that acknowledges history and the trauma and loss involved. It does this through creative practice where kantha techniques are applied to different media and presented as a contemporary art installation, to reveal how a polyphonous reconnection with the past may be possible. This creative research is then contextualised within the practices of a number of contemporary artists who have integrated local and/or culturally specific motifs, metaphors, media and techniques into their art practices as a way to consider broader humanitarian issues and themes of cultural and environmental loss as seen through the lens of personal experience. What I discovered is that rather than simply providing a replication of kantha, this approach offers a self-reflexive solution that permits hybridised cultural complexity and a portable method of making place. Using kantha as the basis for my research design allows singular works to be interrelated and layered to offer open-ended meanings at the interstices between the personal and the mythical, across cultural and geo- political boundaries.

Table of Contents

Keywords ...... 3 Table of Contents ...... 5 List of Images ...... 6 Statement of Original Authorship ...... 9 Acknowledgements ...... 10 Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 11 1.1 Background ...... 11 1.2 Context ...... 13 1.3 Purpose ...... 14 1.4 Thesis Outline ...... 15 Chapter 2: Contextual Review...... 16 2.1 Historical Background ...... 16 2.2 Loss and the Maternal Divine ...... 22 2.3 Contextual Practices: Artists ...... 25 2.4 Traditions of kantha ...... 31 2.5 Living tradition ...... 37 2.6 Summary and Implications ...... 38 Chapter 3: Methodology and Processes ...... 40 3.1 Methodology ...... 40 3.2 Kantha as a method ...... 41 3.2.1 Kanthas ...... 41 3.2.2 Collage...... 43 3.2.3 Bricolage ...... 46 3.3 Related research activities ...... 48 3.4 Reflection ...... 50 Chapter 4: Creative Work ...... 53 4.1 Canvas Painting ...... 53 4.2 The Dolls ...... 57 4.3 Prayer Wheels ...... 62 4.4 Artist’s Books ...... 64 4.5 Installation and Sound ...... 66 Chapter 5: Conclusion ...... 72 Bibliography ...... 76

List of Images

1. Natasha Narain, 2014-2016, Kashmir, Kantha painting, detail (developing stage), oil, mixed media, stitch and collage on unframed canvas. 180 x 100 cm. 2. Kantha, maker unknown, Faridpur District, undivided Bengal, nineteenth century, cotton plain weave with cotton embroidery, 73 x 72.4cm. Stella Kramrisch Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Mason, 2010. 203. Plate 20). Accession number: 1968-184-12. http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/2010/364.html 3. Kantha, maker unknown, Faridpur District, Undivided Bengal, nineteenth century, Cotton plain weave with cotton embroidery, 97.8 x 94 cm, Stella Kramrisch Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Mason, 2010, 216, plate 34). Accession number: 1994-148-704. 4. Kantha, detail, maker unknown, Jessore District, undivided Bengal, nineteenth century, cotton plain weave with cotton embroidery, 88.9 x 81.3cm, Stella Kramrisch Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Mason, 2010, 207, plate 24). Accession number: 1994-148-679. 5. Natasha Narain, 2013-2015, Ivory and S.W.M.I., photographic reproduction of dress as a body and doll as a deity. (Where S.W.M.I. stands for she will / will not make it). 6. Maker: Dhanapati, Kantha, detail, Goddess Chandi. Nineteenth century, Faridpur District, Bengal. 165 x103cm, Stella Kramrisch Collection, Philadelphia, (Mason, 2010, 188, plate 4). 7. Arpita Singh, 2006, Whatever is here, oil on canvas, 214 x 275cm. Exhibited: 2014, Other narratives - Other structures, Lalit Kala Akademi. Vadehra Art Gallery Collection, New Delhi. 8. Kimsooja, 2008, Bottari Tricycle, Installation, used Chinese tricycle, bedcovers and clothes, 295 x 190cm, Continua Gallery, Le Moulin. Image Courtesy: Thierry Depagne. 9. Kantha, maker unknown, Faridpur District, undivided Bengal, late nineteenth Century, Cotton plain weave with cotton embroidery, 165 x 115cm, Stella Kramrisch Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Mason, 2010, 189, Plate 5). 10. Kantha, Vishnu on a horse with eight gopis, detail, maker unknown, nineteenth century, undivided Bengal, 95cm square, cotton plain weave with cotton embroidery, Stella Kramrisch Collection, Philadelphia. 1994-148-705. (Mason, 2010, 185). 11. Natasha Narain, 2016, Inself, kantha painting, acrylic, mixed media and collage on canvas.

12. Natasha Narain, 2015, Performative presentation of Kantha, H.P. University, Simla. India. Image courtesy: Kesang Youdon. 13. Natasha Narain, 2014. Artist in residence at Logan Village Library, as part of community engagement, W.O.R.D.S. “Homesickness Project”, Mentors: Kevin Leong & Elizabeth Woods. Image Credit: Kevin Leong. 14. Natasha Narain, 2013-2016, detail of collage from three kantha paintings. 15. Natasha Narain, 2014-2016, Kalpa Vriksha, Kantha painting, oil, mixed media and collage on un-stretched canvas, 180 x 100cm, Image Courtesy: Carl Warner. 16. Natasha Narain, 2016. Excerpts. Curated by Mark Webb, The Block, QUT. Image Courtesy: QUT Creative Industries Faculty. 17. Natasha Narain, 2015, Body, kantha painting, oil, collage and mixed media on un-stretched canvas,175 x 100cm. Image Courtesy: Carl Warner. 18. (18A). Natasha Narain, 2016. Kantharsis, detail, kantha painting. Acrylic and mixed media, collage on unframed canvas. H 90cm L 90 cm. (18B). Natasha Narain, 2016, Kantharsis, detail. 19. (19A). Natasha Narain, 2011-2014, My Family Tree, (early stage resembling a kantha), employing applique, collage, stitch, mixed media on un-stretched canvas. 180 x 100cm.Image Credit: Carl Warner. (19B). Natasha Narain, 2011- 2014, My Family Tree, completed kantha painting, 180x100cm. Acrylic, collage, stitch and mixed media on un-stretched canvas, clipped onto painted wooden board. 180 x 100cm. Image Credit: Carl Warner. 20. Natasha Narain, 2010-2016, Doll Goddesses, various, singular, in test installations & together. 21. (21A). Natasha Narain, 2016. Mapping Nurture, Central Shrine, Frank Moran Gallery. Image Credit: Carl Warner. (21B). Natasha Narain, 2016. Mapping Nurture. The Dolls rested at Night on the cloth I worked on during the day. (21C) Natasha Narain, 2016, Dolls, detail, various, Mapping Nurture, Image Courtesy: Carl Warner. 22. Natasha Narain, a doll as a photograph, collaged into a My Family Tree kantha painting. Image Credit: Karen Milder. 23. Natasha Narain, 2016, Prayer wheels, painted kantha on canvas, doll parts, installed for Mapping Nurture, Frank Moran Gallery, Image Credit: Carl Warner. 24. (24A). Natasha Narain, 2006-2016, Prayer Wheels, mixed media on wood, canvas and doll parts, as an Installation for Mapping Nurture, Frank Moran Gallery, Image credit: Carl Warner. (24B) in Excerpts, curated by Mark Webb, The Block, QUT, Brisbane, Image Credit: Creative Industries Faculty. 25. Natasha Narain, 2014, Unhallowed, artist’s book, mixed media on found book, Installation on found chair, Mapping Nurture, Frank Moran Gallery, Image Credit: Carl Warner.

26. Natasha Narain, 2013-2014, Womb, Artist’s Book, detail, mixed media, collage, stitch, on found book. H 22cm, L 16cm. 27. Natasha Narain, 2012-2015, Mother and Passage to India, Artist’s Books, mixed media, collage and stitch on found books. (Mother: H20cm L12cm D 5 cm. Passage to India: H 22cm, L 16cm, D 10cm). Image Credit: Carl Warner. 28. Natasha Narain, 2016, Installation, Kantha paintings, dolls, prayer wheels, Mapping Nurture, Frank Moran Gallery, Image Courtesy: Carl Warner. 29. Natasha Narain, 2016, Images from Mapping Nurture: Frank Moran Gallery. Image Credit: Carl Warner. 30. Natasha Narain, 2016, Nadine’s Dress. Mapping Nurture, Frank Moran Gallery. Image Credit: Carl Warner. 31. (31A). Natasha Narain, 2015-2016. D Test Installations at H and Z Block and (31B). Images from my Studio at QUT. 32. Natasha Narain, 2016, Central Shrine, Mapping Nurture, Frank Moran Gallery.QUT. Brisbane. 33. Natasha Narain, 2014-2016, Kashmir, detail from final stage, kantha painting, oil, mixed media, stitch and collage on unframed canvas. 180 x 100 cm. 34. Natasha Narain, 2015, Kantha paintings unrolled and made accessible, Nine Schools of Art, New Delhi. Image Credit: Samudra Kajal Saikia. 35. Natasha Narain, 2016. Images of the cotton sheet, drawn on during Mapping Nurture.

Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature:

Date: 5 September 2017

Acknowledgements

My wholehearted thanks to Dr Courtney Pedersen (Principal Supervisor) and Dr Leah King-Smith (Associate Supervisor) for their guidance, unfailing support, help with editing and memorable conversations. I thank Dr Majena Mafe, as a mentor who realigned my path and Dr Daniel Mafe, who guided me on the methodology of practice-led research. I gratefully acknowledge the financial and material support from QUT Equity and Creative Industries Production Support Scheme. The final write up was on a laptop arranged by the wonderful C.I. HDR Staff. The exhibition at Frank Moran Gallery would not have been possible without the friendly and professional support from the technical staff who helped prepare, install and light the works and the curatorial expertise of Dr Pedersen. Mr Mark Webb further extended this support by the generous inclusion of my works into the QUT Excerpts Show. I am grateful for the opportunities to engage with wider academic and artistic communities that this research has opened up for me: both the feedback received, and friendships formed. I thank Dr Neelima Kanwar for the invitation to write for publication. My thanks for the generous gift of books and access to knowledge of contemporary Indian art made possible by FICA: Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi. My thanks to Mr Kevin Leong and Dr Elizabeth Woods, for the learning offered by the Homesickness project. Nurtured by the meaningful conversations and companionship of Chryszanty and Karen, I am deeply appreciative of their unwavering emotional support. Concurrently, saddened by the loss of close friends, Nadine and Tojo: their memories keep them near. I owe the legacy of Kantha, to my mother Mrs Snigdha Narain, ailing but stoic-as we mourn the recent loss of my Papa, Brigadier Gautam Narain. Every mark on a painting and word on paper is owed to their love and their faith in goodness and in service. I thank my parents for their gifts of resilience, integrity and prayer. My sincere thanks to my kind brother, Vikrant and dear cousins, Alok, Arjun, Neha, Rajat, Surabhi and Tanushree. My pranams also to Rama Buajee, Shobha and Savitha Chacheejee and dear Putlu Mashi, for lovingly blessing my journey. Humbled by the selflessness of care given by Harkajit Rai to my parents and my family: to him I remain indebted. Blessed by the love I so wholeheartedly receive from my dear son Jason and the joy of seeing him grow into a responsible & caring young man: our own math, music and history whiz. May the love of friends and family and his love of music, keep him in abundance. Finally, I am grateful for the flexibility offered by my employer, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, to pursue my talents and to continue being a part of a caring team and the wonderful community at Paddington and Kenmore. Thank you all, so much.

Chapter 1: Introduction

This exegesis is the written component of my practice led research that seeks an intermingling of traditional stitch-based practice with contemporary and hybrid art practices. Both the works produced, and the contextualising artists discussed in this exegesis explore unorthodox approaches to materials as a means to engage with narratives of loss and renewal, on the borders of representation and abstraction. Traversing borders, whether geo-political, temporal or through the body of the art object, my search engages with beliefs regarding the sacred and how we may construct the sacred as reparative. Using transnational and feminist lenses, it reflects on personal and social history and develops material and conceptual interrelationships when the works are presented in the form of an immersive installation. This introductory chapter outlines the background that led me to this research and the context in which it can be placed, as well as its purposes. It describes the significance and scope of this research and provides definitions of terms used. Finally, it includes an outline of the remaining chapters of the thesis.

1.1 BACKGROUND

1. Natasha Narain, 2014-2016, Kashmir, Kantha painting, detail (developing stage), oil, mixed media, stitch and collage on unframed canvas. 180 x 100 cm. As an Indian-Australian, having spent my life equally in both countries, I explore reflective immersion in contemporary visual culture in my art practice, through transnational lenses.

This involves interweaving and opening up to multiple perspectives that are hybrid,1 but entangled within my practice is a latent ancestral tradition that surfaces tacitly in the form of automatic free flowing lines and marks that disorder carefully planned compositions; subverting found books and dolls; and inhabiting interstices demanding unorthodox ways to respond to a world in flux. My research examines this submerged and ancestral tradition as an alternate system of knowledge rather than as a women’s folk or craft practice. It does so by exploring women’s personal and collective history, with reference to Bengal (South Asia) from the nineteenth century. In privileging the tacit, my central and formal inspiration has unfolded into drawing links with the embroidery and textile-based traditional craft of the kantha (a combination of Hindi and Bengali ‘kaan’ or ear and ‘katha’ or a recited mythological story). Kantha becomes a portal that refers to the content, or story, and to an intergenerational transfer of knowledge through embroidering. It also refers to the material or form on which the narrative is placed, usually cotton sarees that have worn down and become fragile. In the absence of art material, Bengali women transformed these soft rags into quilted heirlooms and functional domestic items. This practice of kantha dates back to the sixteenth century in undivided Bengal, where “both Hindu and Muslim women shared common motifs and narratives, and quilts were made from used cotton sarees, softened against the bodies of close kin” (Mason 2010, 1).

This image contains copyright material. 2. Kantha, maker unknown, Faridpur District, undivided Bengal, nineteenth century, cotton plain weave with cotton embroidery, 73 x 72.4cm. Stella Kramrisch Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Mason, 2010. 203. Plate 20). Accession number: 1968-184-12.http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/2010/364.html

1 Hybrid as defined by The Oxford English Dictionary is anything derived from heterogeneous sources, or composed of different or incongruous elements.

Explanation of Terms:

Durga: Formidable battle queen with many arms, she rides a fierce lion or at times, a tiger, symbolising control over the threat posed to family and livestock by the Bengal tiger: Durga defeats Mahisa, the buffalo demon. Over time, Durga has assumed domestic characteristics as the wife of Siva: Parvati, and is linked to crops and to fertility (Kinsley, 1998, 95).

Saraswati: Vedic river goddess praised for her ability to cleanse and to fertilize. Also, the goddess of speech, poetic inspiration and learning. Identified with the dimension of reality that is best described as coherent intelligibility and as creative sound. Worshipped throughout India as the patron goddess of learning (Kinsley, 1998, 55).

Puranas: compendium of myth, ritual, and history, originally only in Sanskrit spoken by the Brahmins, later also-in vernacular languages (Doniger, 2015, 701). The Puranas contain legends of the goddesses and the word Purana in Hindi means, from an earlier time.

Kobhar: drawings made by women from the matriarchal society of Mithila (located in Bihar: India and the Madhesh belt of Nepal). A kobhar can be the marriage proposal on paper, the drawings done on papier-mache baskets or the transformation of the room where the bride will receive her husband, as also, a labour room and a space for the critically ill. By drawing various protective deities, patterns, floral and animal motifs, the space is activated and protected from destructive evil forces (Vequaud, 1977, 17-19).

1.2 CONTEXT

I wanted to know what the technique of kantha, as a practice-led reconnection with tradition through contemporary lenses, had to offer both contemporary art practice and the process of accounting for unidentified feelings of loss. Initially, the absence of first-hand contact with works or even to practitioners of kantha due to significant distance from both place and language, created a gap in my own knowledge that was partly remedied by accessing images and literature through published sources. While this helped me to visualise the lives of my maternal ancestors, it also made apparent my own heterodoxy and disconnection from some of the narratives depicted. This compelled me to reread my own history and religion to appreciate their impact on gender and cultural identity, and to recognise their inherent value

14 pattern. I sought women’s perspectives, both those depicted and those repressed. This was substantiated by a growing appreciation of the practices of Fiona Hall, Kimsooja and Arpita Singh, for their methods of negotiating the boundaries of legitimized narrative in a shared search for meaning within an imperfect world.

1.3 PURPOSE

The objective of this research was to explore how kantha could be reconsidered as a contemporary and productive working method in the context of cultural dislocation and rapid social change. My choice to be an artist is synchronic with my historical position as one of the last holders of the knowledge of kantha in my own family, albeit distanced from my ancestral home and community in Ranaghat, West Bengal. I am guided by a sense of purpose to explore and to preserve the ethos of a personal and familial practice that is capable of both creating a community and thriving within it, while at the same time evolving my own interdisciplinary practice, so that a new body of polyphonous work emerges. This was shadowed by my immersion in kantha from an outsider’s position. In this context of distance, I asked how one would make a kantha without having learnt the stitching, heard the stories depicted, or had direct access to remaining practitioners. In a search made possible through published sources, I sought to contribute in a way that bridged my past to my present, drawing my personal and diasporic journey to make its own unique and emerging contribution. This intellectual work, in tandem with creative practice, has provided a reflective consideration of my time and place in history, and the establishment of new methods and narratives that augment the content and vocabulary of my visual language. The practical outcomes include new kantha paintings, a growing body of doll goddesses, artist books, kantha-dresses as bodies, and prayer wheels, all presented together in the form of an installation.

The significance of this creative practice research lies in its rejection of predetermined artistic patterns for a practice usually described as folk art or craft. The process of creating works utilising the principles and methods of kantha rather than simply copying or replicating has contributed to correcting the current state of kantha as a craft or as a piecemeal pre-designed product of small-scale industry in Bengal. By carrying out this research, I have given agency back to the self-reflexive kantha practitioner in a contemporary art context.

1.4 THESIS OUTLINE

This thesis engages in five interlinked areas of research, namely: the history of Bengal in the nineteenth and twentieth century; the relevant mythology of a (South Asian) female sacred; kantha as a self-reflexive women’s art practice; the contemporary practices of Fiona Hall, Arpita Singh and Kimsooja; and finally, my own interdisciplinary practice.

In Chapter 2, the Contextual Review, the history and mythology underpinning kantha from nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal is examined to appreciate the lives of the women who made the kanthas. This includes the establishment of Kolkata (Calcutta), the Bengal renaissance, social history, famines, displacement, the partition of India, the Bangladesh war of Independence. This leads to a discussion on the cessation of kantha, and how it changes into a collectible artefact.

The second contextualising topic is loss and the maternal divine, particularly shifts that take place in the feminine sacred as linked to the experiential reality of women and historical events. This section covers select South Asian Goddesses, as well as Kobhar and Alpana practices and a selected work of Nalini Malani. Thirdly, I discuss the work of three artists whose practices echo some of my research concerns: Fiona Hall, Arpita Singh and Kimsooja. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the practice of kantha itself and perspectives on kantha as a living tradition and language.

In Chapter 3, I discuss my methodology and processes, including the use of practice-led and qualitative methods to collect and test my knowledge of kantha in order to develop portable, sustainable, narrative-driven, interdisciplinary art objects that function solely or together and make place for a feminist approach. Collage and bricolage are discussed as approaches to research and making.

Chapter 4 discusses the creative work arising from the project, including paintings, dolls, installation and sound, and analyses how these relate back to my research question. Finally, Chapter 5 summarises my research conclusions.

Chapter 2: Contextual Review

2.1 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

As no documentation exists of the origin of kantha, its history is as approximate as other domestic and craft traditions. As Darielle Mason explains:

[Its origins] may be dated as far back as the sixteenth century, not long after the Portuguese arrived [...] though most surviving examples date to the seventeenth century […] kanthas may well have been produced for personal, domestic use for many centuries before the earliest surviving examples (Mason, 2010, 3). The practice of kantha would be traced to a geographical location that covers current day Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Assam (states within India) and its neighbour, Bangladesh. It predates the arrival of the British East India Company and the establishment of Kolkata (Calcutta) out of three villages in 1690 (Chakravorty & Stearns, 2008, Para, 1). This time period between the seventeenth and early nineteenth century saw the gradual transfer of political power from an Islamic Mughal dynasty to the colonial East India Company. It includes cultural, social, economic and intellectual shifts, also referred to as the Bengal renaissance (Dhar, 1987, 26- 27) lasting from the nineteenth to early twentieth century. During this movement, mostly restricted to urban centres, upper class and educated men, familiar with liberal western thought but resistant to the spread of Christianity, turned a lens back on their own heritage to address patriarchal rules and practices that disempowered women, such as child marriage, Sati (immolation in the funeral pyre), and denial of education. However, while the movement questioned existing orthodoxies, a gap existed between this intellectual exercise and the real lives of women. Poet Rabindranath Tagore criticised the double standards adopted by men as evidenced by the Bengali Babu2 depicted in kalighat pat paintings,3 which showed deities, but also landlords and the new clerical middle class continuing in their oppressive and orthodox ways. Meanwhile in rural Bengal, absentee landlords increased taxation. Land was given over to the cultivation of cash crops such as indigo, cotton, poppy and jute (instead of

2 Bengali Babu: “Babu was an honorific form of address for the Bengali elite, but in the nineteenth century it also gained currency as a term of derision of certain men: pleasure seekers spending their new wealth, or pampered sons their inherited wealth, on drinking and other amusements” (Hacker, 2010, 66) 3 Kalighat pat: Early nineteenth century, swiftly painted souvenirs on cloth made by pat painters for pilgrims visiting the Kali temple near Calcutta. They were carried all over Bengal, and even made into lithograph prints.

17 rice) and this, along with the failure of rain, led to catastrophic shortage of food and the famine of 1770 (Gunn, 2009, 83-87).

The upheavals continued when the transportation of indentured labour from Bihar and Bengal to the Pacific and the Caribbean began from 1834 (Anderson, 2009, 93, 99, 101). Clare Anderson explains that even though slavery had been officially abolished:

In nineteenth-century India, there was a close association between convict transportation and indentured migration, discursively, institutionally, and imaginatively. […] indenture was a ‘new system of slavery’ […] colonial administrators used established penal practices in formulating procedures surrounding recruitment, identification, and embarkation. […] Absolutely central to Indian understandings of indenture were beliefs that both transportation and migration invoked social rupture and permanent loss. Convicts, migrants, and their communities were deeply affected by the absence that transportation and indenture produced. (These processes of) social removal and dislocation thus became sites of subaltern anxiety and the circulation of rumour and speculation (Anderson, 2009, 104).

Tied as it was to the lives of women in rural areas, the practice of kantha was further impacted by the famine of 1943, when torrential rain, cyclone, administrative underestimation of food requirements, and the destruction of rice crops in Burma to discourage Japanese advancement into the region further aggravated the shortfall in Bengal. Starvation led to mass influx of the rural destitute to Calcutta. Official policy insured “the maintenance of essential food supplies to the industrial area of Calcutta must be ranked on a very high priority […] [so] masses of rural destitute trekked from the districts into the city: by July 1943 the streets were full.” (Sen, 1977, 37-38). Poverty, growing unrest and nationalism led to the 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan (Bengal was divided into Indian West Bengal and East Pakistan). The partition resulted in disastrous displacement from communal riots (Butalia, 2000, 1-20) (Mukherjee J, 2011, 6-14) (Mukherjee M, 2011, 1-3).

Curiously, these catastrophic events are largely missing from kantha decoration. This contradiction, between reality and the imagery depicted on kanthas may suggest their production during a more peaceful time, or that once kanthas had begun to be sold they became displaced from ancestral place and family, just as their makers themselves experienced social change and displacement. Yet the conspicuous absence of the abject and of extremities of experience in these depictions may also allude to societal silencing of shame, loss and an avoiding of the impure. Conversely, this marginalisation of women’s everyday experiences in works made by women, on one hand maintained kanthas as sacred

This image contains copyright material. 3. Kantha, maker unknown, Faridpur District, Undivided Bengal, nineteenth century, Cotton plain weave with cotton embroidery, 97.8 x 94 cm, Stella Kramrisch Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Mason, 2010, 216, plate 34). Accession number: 1994-148-704. http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/88617.html?mulR=1901423883%7C37 talismans and magical wraps. But, this erasure if seen as a containment, constrained a living tradition because there was so much that could not be depicted, linked as it was to trauma, to shame and the silenced within women’s lives. My research considers how ideas of restitution, reparation and making ‘whole’ could help mend and make meaning from that which has become unsayable, or made lives seem meaningless. As explained by Mason:

The partition of 1947 was accompanied by an enormous displacement of people and destruction of property, and it dramatically altered domestic life on both sides of the border, changing, if not destroying many local craft traditions. […] this dislocation of women seems to have been the major factor in the decline of embroidered kanthas, particularly those with elaborate narrative imagery (Mason, 2010, 15). The resulting social upheaval of this period required kantha to operate as economic commodities aiding their makers’ survival. Kanthas’ continuance is owed to its collectors, while paradoxically this has mostly removed kanthas from its origins in Bengal and restricted how many can be seen in the first hand or touched and kept within family.

The nineteenth century also saw a search for spiritual solutions amidst oppressive social and religious practices, and a renewed interest in ancient knowledge such as the texts of the Upanishads. Philosophy that sought liberation through a connection with a universal soul or a spirit that imbued all creation, such as the Upanishadic Brahman, was ascendant. This was reflected in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore and in the reading of kantha from pan-Indic perspectives (as opposed to a local lens) by its major collector and Indologist, Dr Stella Kramrisch. Kramrisch was fascinated with Hindu narrative imagery and this influenced her approach to collecting. However, early nineteenth century rural Bengal was secluded still from nationalist/ divisive politics and there were many similarities in lived experiences, material culture and shared beliefs of Muslim and Hindu women, such as respect for an Islamic / Sufi Satya Pir alongside a Hindu Satya Narayana that led to overlaps in motifs and imagery. As evidenced through “a kantha which has the richest Hindu narrative imagery, including the Ramayana battle, (but) shares the surface with a roundel bearing the Arabic inscription Ya Allah, the Muslim invocation of God’s name” (Mason 2010, 15).

Kramrisch organised in 1968 an exhibition, Unknown India: Ritual Art in Tribe and Village at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that travelled on to San Francisco and St Louis and in doing so legitimized folk art by placing it in a Fine Arts museum. However, as Katherine Hacker explains:

Kramrisch’s show functioned simultaneously within domains of inclusion and exclusion: inserted into the canon of aesthetic objects but contained as so-called traditional or ritual arts, fixing indigenous cultures in traditional mode (Hacker, 2000, 11-14). [She further explains]. Within the context of India, ‘tribe’ was introduced in the mid-nineteenth century as an administrative and ideological category. The dual efforts of colonial administrators and ethnographers to know and control India’s different peoples by imposing a classificatory system (that) established artificially static, bounded categories, most notably the hierarchal caste/ egalitarian tribal dichotomy (Hacker, 2000, 5). A contemporary of Kramrisch, Gurusaday Dutt (1882-1941) was a civil servant who travelled extensively throughout Bengal and collected kanthas that are now housed in a museum named after him in Kolkata. Dutt saw kantha both as a folk tradition and as a method of self- determination by rural and vernacular practitioners that was emblematic of their participation in a growing nationalist discourse –but in a manner that was different to both urban and modern methods.

This image contains copyright material. 4. Kantha, detail, maker unknown, Jessore District, undivided Bengal, nineteenth century, cotton plain weave with cotton embroidery, 88.9 x 81.3cm, Stella Kramrisch Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Mason, 2010, 207, plate 24). Accession number: 1994-148-679. http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/88588.html?mulR=7613%7C6

As explained by Hacker:

Although he argued for a deep continuity with the past, he also insisted upon a rupture and discontinuity with the urban present [This] dichotomy of tradition and modernity [is] a false opposition that positions tradition as unchanging in contrast with modernity as exemplifying progress, innovation and change (Hacker, 2010, 60, 64).

Also associated with kantha is the practice of alpana, which both Kramrisch and Dutt recognised as, linked to kantha. Alpana consists of designs painted on the ground using pulverised rice, and is associated with Vrata rituals, mostly “life cycle events, especially marriage rituals and celebrations surrounding birth and early childhood, such as the first consumption of rice, entailed their own alpanas.” (Mason, 2010, 6). In the spirit of educational reform, Rabindranath Tagore set up Visva Bharati (communion of the world with India) and a department of Fine Art (Kala Bhawan, my alma mater) in rural Santiniketan in

1921. As an acknowledgement of indigenous and marginal practices, alpana was encouraged but it was ‘cleansed’ of all ritual connotations. According to Mason:

At Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva-Bharati University, […] Alpana was transformed by highly trained artists into a decorative art form used in celebrations but deliberately stripped of devotional and appellate functions (Mason, 2010, 27).

This historical background is to help clarify the gap between the intellectual meaning making, reformist or restorative efforts, and the voice of the practitioner. Where catastrophic changes and famines deeply affected the lived experience of women, these events also effected the cessation of kantha as a self-reflexive creative practice. Concurrently, celebrations and rituals were a part of women’s lives, but were subsumed into the metanarratives of political history, and family history was often eroded by mass displacement. Additionally, over a period of nine months from March to December 1971, the Bangladesh war of Independence from the military rule of (West) Pakistan witnessed the rape of 300,000 women in a strategic attempt to target Bengali ethnic identity (D’Costa, 2012.19). The women were later referred to as Birangona or war heroes, but this did not erase the social stigma, or the avoidance of victims as reminders of shame and led to the silencing of extremities of experiences to become deeply held secrets: a loss akin to a spectral wound (Mookherjee, 2015, p. 15-16).

After the formation of Bangladesh, a revival of Bengali language and cultural practices, encouraged the revival of Kantha (Mason, 2010, 18-20). Whilst this made it possible for women to earn a livelihood- it reduced kantha to becoming a functional design item and encouraged a replication of historical examples as a form of continuation of tradition. Consequently, kanthas from the nineteenth and early twentieth century have been ascribed symbolic meanings, or placed into categories dependent on use such as a handkerchief, a mat, a wrap and so on, but with inconsistent documentation of the maker, time or place of origin.

Examining historical examples of kantha against its historical background has helped me to see the unsaid within women’s lives and to strengthen my understanding of South Asian feminism4. Consequently, I have chosen to keep away from superficial topicality and didacticism in my own creative work.

4 While an overview of South Asian feminism is beyond the scope of this research, practitioners and thinkers whose work is crucial in this area include Urvashi Butalia, Veena Das, Anita Dube, Chadra Talpade Mohanty, Nalini Malani, Nayanika Mookherjee and Arpita Singh.

2.2 LOSS AND THE MATERNAL DIVINE

The Sacred Feminine For the purposes of this research I am using Amy Peck’s definition of the sacred feminine: The Sacred Feminine is a paradigm of Universal Motherhood. It is a principle that embraces concepts of the Holy Mother, the Goddesses of ancient mythologies, the angelic realms, the Divine Self within, Mother Earth doctrines and lore of indigenous peoples. It is a spiritual model that weaves concepts of wisdom, compassion and unconditional love, plus other metaphysical, shamanic, pagan and magical practices. And it is a principle that returns the lost knowledge from prehistoric matri-focal societies around the world to contemporary application and appreciation. The Sacred Feminine paradigm restores the balance of the spiritual, cultural, and pragmatic relationship between Feminine/Masculine, Mother/Father, Women/Men and Earth Spirit ideals (Peck in Tate 2014, 15). My consideration of the seemingly inexplicable contradictions within what is considered sacred and how it may be constructed is informed by my experiences from having spent years living in India, the U.K and Australia. If the sacred is a veneration, a valuing or respecting, I acknowledge boundaries within my heritage as well as all other beliefs that deny women and their bodies the opportunity to feel or access the sacred. On one hand, by disrespecting or violating their bodies, or by denigrating their metaphysical and potentially reparative practices as magical and profane. Especially as domestic violence and various forms of abuse continue behind closed doors in both my ‘home countries’ and elsewhere, and silence muffles miscarriage and/or termination. Therefore, in my creative work, I ask if an art practice can serve as an agent of partial reparation and of some restitution by consciously making the sacred in a contemporary context.

5. Natasha Narain, 2013-2015, Ivory and S.W.M.I., photographic reproduction of dress as a body and doll as a deity. (Where S.W.M.I. stands for she will / will not make it).

Religious and mythological gods and goddesses are relevant to their time in history. For instance, Sita, the long-suffering wife of Rama, was born from the earth in Mithila and returned to it, tired from having to prove her chastity and virtue to her husband. Sita remains the aspirational ideal of a virtuous wife in Mithila. Often depicted on kanthas, is Goddess Durga. As explained by Mason: The rise of Durga and Kali, both martial goddesses believed to have been created from the combined energies of male gods otherwise unable to defeat Mahisasur5 “may assert their ascendency in elite urban circles in the nineteenth century [and] their shifting roles as the nascent nation began to be imagined as a mother goddess rising to crush the demon of colonialism” (Mason, 2010, 82).

Kanthas depicted narratives that resemble the sculpted reliefs on Bengali terracotta temples and tales from recitations of Devi Mahatamya, which honours Durga, and is recited during her festival (in October, this ran concurrently with my show). Durga is an embodiment of Shakti: a primordial force that restores balance in the world. As Doniger explains:

It remained for the Puranas to tell of a goddess who killed the antigods herself. Such a goddess, first under the name of Chandika (‘the fierce”), later often called Durga (“Hard to get”), bursts into the Sanskrit scene full grown […] in a complex myth, that includes a hymn of a thousand names. Many of the names allude to entire mythological episodes that must have grown onto the goddess, like barnacles onto a great ship, gradually for centuries. The founding text is “The glorification of the Goddess” (Devi Mahatamya) […], which also tells a number of other stories about powerful women and goddesses between the fifth and seventh centuries of the Common Era. […] a compilation of many earlier texts about the goddess, either from other, lost Sanskrit texts or from lost or never preserved vernacular sources, in Magadhi or Tamil, perhaps. Some of the stories may have come from villages or tribal cultures where the goddess had been worshipped for centuries: early in her history she may have been associated with the periphery of society,” tribal or low-caste peoples who worshipped her in wild places. Yet by the time of the Markandeya Purana (250 CE and 550 CE), goddesses were worshipped in both cities and villages, by people all along the economic spectrum (Doniger, 2015, 388).

Kanthas from the nineteenth century also depict the blue god Krishna, in narratives that depict his consort Radha awaiting his arrival whether in isolation or with her servants. These

5 Mahisasur: Buffalo chief of the ‘Asuras’ or tribal anti gods, skilled in magical prowess, was granted a boon to be invincible to all opponents except a woman. He defeated the Brahmannical gods who then assembled and emitted their fiery energies to create Durga as the resolver and superior warrior. Mahisasur is usually shown as an antigod emerging out of a buffalo’s open mouth, and is slain by Durga after a long battle. (Kinsley, 1998, 96-97 and Doniger, 2015, 389).

narratives are usually seen as romantic interludes, but they are also examples of the affluence and isolation of mostly upper class married women. Pika Ghosh explains: Literary works of the period also describe escalating familial stresses and the isolation of women, particularly of the upper classes, while their husbands turned to the adventures offered in the flourishing brothels of the thriving metropolis. Radha’s lot was likewise mixed. While she enjoyed Krishna’s special attention, she was often betrayed and angered as he strayed to other women. Ultimately, Krishna left her, entering the next stage of life to become a king and the husband of another woman (Ghosh, 2010, 91).

Manasa, or Mana Devi, as the serpent goddess of Bengal, is worshipped in the rainy season to protect against snake bite and she appears on many kanthas and pat paintings as a snake or as a water pot (usually left on the threshold, with milk, to appease snakes and to keep them from entering the household). In oral renditions, Manasa is identified as being of mixed parentage (part Adivasi/ tribal/ subaltern and Siva’s daughter, but one that he lusted after). Manasa had to fight to be accepted as a Hindu goddess and is considered ferocious towards those who do not accord her due status. Finally, Doniger explains,

General considerations of the relationship between myth and history operate here. The myths reflect attitudes toward women rather than the actual history of real women, but they also influence the subsequent actual history of real women (Doniger, 2015, 378- 379).

This image contains copyright material.6. Maker: Dhanapati, Kantha, detail, Goddess Chandi. Nineteenth century, Faridpur District, Bengal. 165 x103cm, Stella Kramrisch Collection, Philadelphia, (Mason, 2010, 188, plate 4). http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/114206.html?mulR=46415534%7C26

As religious narratives permit the co-existence of human with superhuman and normal with fantastical, in my work I transform rejected and donated dolls and dresses into cross cultural goddesses. They reappear in my paintings as collaged photographs and playfully install themselves on prayer wheels, gradually building new narratives and a personal relationship. These dolls and their dioramas explore what Green refers to as:

A key element in modern feminist studies of the Goddess is the concept of revitalization and reconstruction, the desire for a reorientation of culture towards the centrality of the female. […] female sprits were responsible also for the fertility and general well-being of their worshippers: they provided them with spiritual refreshment, and guided them in life, cherishing them in the grave and beyond (Billington and Green, 1996, 2).

Divinity from feminist and psychic perspectives is explored in the works of contemporary artist, Nalini Malani. In a compelling five channel video ‘Mother India: Transactions in the construction of pain’ exhibited in Sydney (Nalini Malani, 2005), the artist utilises multiple screens to present a range of images that envelop the viewer within a fifteen-metre space, demanding an emotional and visceral connection. The screens show nationalist narratives, Hindu images of divinities such as Durga riding a lion, calm domesticated women, the holy cow- alongside communal violence and devastation. Displaced teeth coincide with the inscribing of topographical details and place names on skin, (as marks of ownership by the perpetrator and a perpetual reminder of loss, for the victim). This work links the riots of the Partition (1947) to Gujarat (2002) and raises questions on the contradictions between the sacred role of women as mothers and home makers (maternal divine) to some being defiled and silenced. My interest in my own cultural heritage’s female sacred and my experience of the transnational status of women come together in my practice in the form of an ongoing exploration of goddess mythology, to find connections with a living tradition and ways of making meaning that my ancestors also employed.

2.3 CONTEXTUAL PRACTICES: ARTISTS

In this section, I will briefly discuss the work of three established women artists whose works examine history and material culture and offer unique examples that provide a context for my own practice.

Fiona Hall

I am drawn to Fiona Hall’s Leaf Litter (2001) and Tender (2003-2005) series made on currency notes because they reference the impact of colonisation and globalisation on the natural environment, including history that is shared between Australia, Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh (but is not limited to these countries).

Both nature and the colonised became economic resources and something exotic to be captured in detailed drawings and engravings of the nineteenth century. However, in these two series, Hall inverts this tradition by using mimesis as a form of atonement by privileging nature and humanity over colonisation and commerce. Hall achieves this through her detailed observation and exacting aesthetic representation. Her observations of the many different types of bird nests to suit the needs of different birds are evidenced by her shredding and repurposing of currency notes into eighty-six different nests (Tender). Similarly, Hall transfers her understanding of the variety and complexity of the many species of leaves by drawing them in exacting detail onto currency notes (Leaf Litter). Admittedly, Hall’s confident subversion of currency notes was perhaps possible due to her position as an artist from an economically powerful nation (Australia), residing in a prestigious and nurturing creative environment made possible by the Lunagunga Trust in Sri Lanka. In a deeply committed and longstanding engagement spread over years of practice, colonial economics, nature, art, loss and nurture intersect.

Hall describes Tender as inspired by her “wonder, fascination and respect for what birds can achieve [and their] social architecture.” and explains how the title suggests nurture but also, ‘American legal tender’ (QAGOMA YouTube video 2010). Hall’s subversive destruction of the notes by shredding and slicing reduces, (questions the value or devalues) the currency into a raw material. These strips are assembled into nests in a manner that acknowledges the dexterity and ingenuity displayed by birds. However, the nests remain abandoned and silenced within a cabinet placed inside a building where birds cannot enter. This interest in transforming the manufactured to resemble nature and in doing so to make meaning can also be seen in Hall’s exquisite sardine can plants (Paradisus terrestris, 1999).

In Leaf Litter, Hall’s decision to draw a detailed leaf on an existing and used surface (note), reminds me of the methods employed by a kantha practitioner: a juxtaposition emerges as the

27 leaf is centrally drawn (veritably sewn) mark by mark (stitch by stitch) onto the surface, drawing links to existing images that underpin the drawing and the new leaf becomes the hero growing in stature and making its presence known, privileging nature and nurture over environmental loss for economic gain. As Linda Michael, curator of Hall’s Wrong Way Time at the National Gallery of Australia (2016) and the Venice Biennale (2015), explains, “[Hall’s practice] brings together hundreds of diverse materials and images to explore three intersecting concerns: global politics, world finances and the environment” (Michael, 2016, 4).

Also exhibited at this Biennale were Hall’s works on Tapa or Tongan bark cloth (titled Fools Gold) from her expedition to New Zealand’s Kermadec Trench, in 2011. Adhering to colours obtained from natural dyes: brown, black, orange, deep red, cream: large, portable, painted works bear resemblance to the patterns and grids of a traditional Tapa, but are transformed into emotive narratives of loss and destruction. (Reminiscent also, of the cataclysmic imagery of Hall’s Inferno series of the 1980s). Hall activates the surface of her Moat (2011) Tapa with energetic lines, allowing paint to drip, mutating white borders into rows of sharp teeth, catching predatory sharks within nets, whilst ships become mining vessels that diagonally cut across the space (traversing boundaries) and take centre stage. A variety of marine and bird life are shown entangled within nets, as are skulls, coral and dynamite. Employing text such as “No Hope” or scattering the letters for “I [a] m not scared” or “Trench warfare”: the work retains a powerful visual appeal further enhanced by a variety of lines. At times confident and aggressive while at other times soft, as in the delicate cross hatching of fishing nets. Salt water shimmers alongside detailed observations from the natural world and Hall brings an immediacy to the environmental catastrophe unfolding on the sea: as also on her Tapa. Bearing seeds for how a tradition is respectfully rejuvenated and its methods extended to express urgent contemporary concerns. Evidencing how a sensitive artist can help to reactivate a sacred tradition that they have not been born into. While this privilege to absorb from other cultures bears historical precedence in Western art history as linked to colonisation, Hall allows a plurality and sensitivity that speaks for nature, the environment and the colonised. Hall also addresses the loss of cultural heritage and language (tapa) and attempts a restitution by rejuvenating the Tapa into a contemporary visual medium.

Arpita Singh

Born in 1937 in Bengal, Singh moved to Delhi in 1946, where she witnessed a man being killed as communal violence escalated and continued into the 1947 partition of India (Datta 2014, 6). This violence has ebbed and surged, but its threats have entered into bodies and domestic spaces in India over the last seventy years. It has also been expressed through the works of Singh’s contemporaries Nalini Malani and Nilima Sheikh. Singh’s exploration of this content in a manner that is non-didactic has evolved over time. Her early works were abstract with lines and geometrical forms (Untitled, oil on canvas, 1961) potentially linked to her mentor Biren De’s work. Singh introduced dark domestic spaces, objects, bodily presence as eyes (Whether it is violet or yellow, 1970) and marks resembling kantha stitches in increasingly layered surfaces that privileged narrative storytelling. Her compositional arrangements intersected between Indian miniature painting, western realism and a kantha. Her drawings are described by Ella Datta as:

diverse forms – complex constructs representing man-made grids, elements from nature, mesh-like lines evoking weaves of fabrics […] dense, shadowy, stage-like backgrounds out of which emerged sinuous shapes. Arpita’s lines are impassioned, exuberant, dynamic and often aggressive. Unusual experimentations like perforations, scratching’s on paper with needles, scissors, and blades were done (Datta, 2014, 10).

Singh contemplates her place in the world in a manner that permits darkness, conflict, fear and vulnerability to be represented. She usually places a woman’s body, whether autobiographical or that of a goddess, facing their own subjective traumas at the centre. In Devi (1999), a widow in white is armed with fruits, a gun aimed at a Babu, and (like Kali) her feet are shown resting on her male partner while birds nonchalantly fly overhead. Identical looking men in black coats and white pants (My lollipop city, 2005) or in military uniforms and holding guns (My lily pond, 2009) invade pictorial space, resembling schematic stamps repeatedly pressed onto the body of a canvas strewn with surrendering bodies of women and layered over by text as form, as mark and as meaning. As a witness to conflicts of her time (e.g. The Golden deer, 2004 and Whatever is here, 2006), Singh explores perspectives of fear, frailty and interiority as expressed through an inward, withdrawn but contemplative gaze (Woman smoking, 2005), and in x-ray-like representations of the inside of a woman’s body (The river project, 2007). Similar to a kantha practitioner, Singh depicts observations from her everyday: airplanes, cars, flowers, birds, ducks, goats, cats, domestic objects such as a

29 pedestal fan, or a frilly edged pillow, undergarments, even a table set for tea. In doing so, Singh honours the interrelationships between minor and metanarratives that together form the worldview of a practitioner.

This image contains copyright material. 7. Arpita Singh, 2006, Whatever is here, oil on canvas, 214 x 275cm. Exhibited: 2014, Other narratives - Other structures, Lalit Kala Akademi. Vadehra Art Gallery Collection, New Delhi. http://www.vadehraart.com/arpita-singh-other-narratives-other-structure/

Singh also employs text as it appears in newspapers and on packaging to activate the surface of works, adding meaning and allowing text to become a pattern. I see this as similar to kantha stitches that quilt and connect disparate parts together (see Ocean dream, 2011 and From time to time, 2012). This compositional complexity with no breathing space is sometimes contradicted by open space around a figure so that some paintings resemble an Indian miniature painting (The Moth, 2013). However, Singh intentionally eludes meanings, avoids linear progression, employs intricacy of line and allows colours to become empowering agents that make the world beautiful again – but where beauty includes ageing, disease, loss, and politics. Her colours remain fresh and alluring in a manner similar to a kantha, and motifs and symbols bring playful cheer as ducks, airplanes, cars and buses are not shown in their real proportional size but scaled by their significance to the story or as imagery that enhances the story telling. Her works have a distinct sense of place (Delhi) with map-like grids, street names and important sites marked out (My lollipop city: Gemini rising, 2005). Singh’s work entices me with its familiarity of location, inviting me to read and recognise

30 street names and landmarks and to be absorbed by the proliferation of visual and textual information. My eyes travel along meandering streets in search of meaning by decoding. I am also drawn to the substantial size of the work (1.5 x 2.13m), which allows for the viewer’s immersion. In this practice, which has evolved over fifty years, lies an ability to tell dark stories on a monumental scale. Singh privileges women’s narratives, using unexpected motifs like fried eggs and vulture-like birds in colours that invite hope and cleanse the darkness of violence, but cannot eliminate it.

Kimsooja

I was captivated by an image of the Bottari (Korean bedcovers) as part of Kimsooja’s (A Mirror Woman, 2002) reproduced in a book on Global Feminism (Kee, 2007. 114). I am drawn to the bottaris for their rich colours and resemblance to Indian sarees, but also for the ways by which the artist Kimsooja had extended textiles that were a part of everyday life and cultural heritage of women into a medium of contemporary art practice. Kimsooja achieved this without physically altering the textile (not cutting, dyeing, writing, stamping, tearing) but by respecting its history and keeping it ‘whole’. Instead, she extends the context and meaning through the visual arrangement of her bottari in site-specific ways and by doing so, Kimsooja transforms spaces with her portable, colourful and soft (feminine) material. As Joan Kee notes, “the embroidered patterns [are] a contingent presence that transform the work from an object to an occurrence” (Kee 2007, 114). Presented as installations and not as cultural objects behind glass or as folk art, the bottaris retain their own meanings but also invoke existential concerns. The works allude to practices of nurture through tedious women’s work such as wrapping, storing in bundles, placing, arranging, or hanging on a line (A Mirror Woman, 2002; Conditions of Humanity, 2004; various bundles of Bottari from 2004 to 2014), or evince loss and displacement by disorder and by leaving undone (Deductive Object, 1993). The bottaris huddle together like refugees in trucks (Cities on the move, 1997), or spill overturned from a rickshaw (Bottari Tricycle, 2008). Kimsooja’s presentation extends the bottari from the functional to a metaphorical sphere without violent or abject means, but by suggestion of disruption through (dis)placement. In doing so, Kimsooja creates places for contemplation on culture, existence, women’s work and what we consider valuable.

This image contains copyright material. 8. Kimsooja, 2008, Bottari Tricycle, Installation, used Chinese tricycle, bedcovers and clothes, 295 x 190cm, Continua Gallery, Le Moulin. Image Courtesy: Thierry Depagne.

Kimsooja also extends ideas of ‘stitching’ in her video works, where her silent body symbolically connects places and people who would otherwise have never met (A needlewoman, 2005). This reminds me of a kantha way of seeing interconnectedness and that the stitch does not need to be literal. She posits stillness as a form of resilience that may restore wholeness and strength by not permitting external forces to puncture a bottari or her own body. She simultaneously confirms stitching as being a silent and contemplative process. Kimsooja has embraced technological solutions whereby the bottari transcends cloth and is transformed as colour, form and light, creating a meditative and dialogical environment, evolving into a new form that is hybrid, digital and contemporary (e.g. To Breathe, 2015 and Thread Routes, 2015).

In conclusion, these three artists’ ways of approaching narrative, surface, and intercultural communication have significantly informed my own reinterpretation of the complex kantha tradition, which forms the basis for my creative practice research.

2.4 TRADITIONS OF KANTHA

As previously discussed, the hardships faced by the rural poor would have no doubt encouraged a need for restitution of all available material. Rural women had long spun the thread that weavers wove into cloth, which when too thin was then refashioned into kanthas. In this way, kanthas invoked the reassuring touch of many hands and alternated between

32 restorative and functional uses. Not all kanthas were made from rags however, according to Bangladeshi academic, Niaz Zaman: “Kanthas made on fine saris only affordable to the relatively more affluent tend to have finer workmanship. The finer the kantha, the more exposed the maker was to art and culture” (Zaman, 2010, 117). Zaman provides a richly crafted example where the maker identifies herself through the sewn text as Manadasundari (she who has a beautiful mind). She describes her own work as a Sujni (not kantha). Embroidering of text suggests literacy that empowered some women in the nineteenth century. Zaman explains:

The word sujni, unlike “kantha”, has associations with embroidery, being derived from the Persian term suzan, referring to needle. The term suzani, meaning ‘of needles’ or ‘embroidered’, is still used for decorative tribal textiles in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and other central Asian countries (Zaman, 2012, 123).

The sujni kantha that was made by Manadasundari for her father of her own free will, indicated her independent access to material, in that it was not commissioned nor was it a part of her traditional wedding trousseau. An examination of the work on a recent visit to the Gurusaday Museum in Kolkata, made apparent the complexity of the narrative. It also suggested Manadasundari was a young widow, able to stay in her parental home (instead of suffering abandonment or deprivation) which would explain her gratitude. As a highly observant viewer and skilled embroiderer of people and events, her attention to detail such as in noting the difference of attire between English and Indian soldiers, the liveliness of the mendicants who visited, and her eye for colour has created a rich and telling narrative ‘with her own hands’.

Additionally, “the finest embroidered quilts or nakshi kanthas do not seem to have come from illiterate individuals. Some of the kanthas have inscriptions on them, occasionally in a very fine hand” (Zaman, 2010, 117 and 119). The term nakshi derived from naksha or map, is a word shared between Urdu, Hindi and Bengali, and is used by some practitioners to describe their kantha.

This image contains copyright material. 9. Kantha, maker unknown, Faridpur District, undivided Bengal, late nineteenth Century, Cotton plain weave with cotton embroidery, 165 x 115cm, Stella Kramrisch Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Mason, 2010, 189, Plate 5). http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/88594.html?mulR=3365

Mason makes a compelling argument for the cross-cultural sacred aspect of kantha when she explains: the corner tree motifs on kanthas […] evoke the [Hindu] temple, with its cardinal openings […] as well as the symmetric Muslim tomb or shrine, with its central dome [lotus] corner towers, and four cardinal iwans (vaulted openings). These architectural parallels remind us that kanthas were created to be “read” – and in a sense to function – as sacred spaces” (Mason, 2010, 9). Bengali art historian, Pika Ghosh elucidates the other ways that kanthas are sacred heirlooms: Particularized practices of using kanthas, such as for the prayer mats women use in Dhaka homes, or for wrapping the Quran and other prayer books, and the inherent potential for these kanthas in the transmission of spirituality, faith, and sacred knowledge from one user to the next remains to be considered. […] kanthas can invoke the touch of many hands, known and unknown to each owner. They can also conjure images of many homes, and with them, imaginary homelands (Ghosh, 2010, 37).

As Ghosh points out, the “transmission of touch” is common across South Asia where blessings or the sacred can be bestowed through fabric. Ghosh offers the example of giving a shawl or sari to a guru to wear temporarily as evidence of this. But the intergenerational and

34 domestic aspects of kantha “take on further nuances when the continuities of use and giving go farther back to their making and reuse of old cloth” (Ghosh, 2010, 43).

The many similarities in methods of practice, motifs and usage between Hindu and Muslim kanthas allude to having come from the same soil or landscape, and similar patriarchal family structures. However, what is missing from kanthas is the direct depiction of famines, hardships, violence, rapes and displacement. Zainul Abedin, who was born in 1914 in Mymensingh (current day Bangladesh), also collected kanthas and helped establish the Folk Art and Crafts Museum at Sonargoan. His birthplace had once been a major producer of rice and jute, but was devastated by the famine of 1943 followed by the partition in 1947 (Hacker, 2010, 68, 69). Abedin made ‘famine drawings from life’ of the rural communities streaming into wartime Calcutta. Communities such as those of agricultural labourers and fishermen depicted on kanthas and in that kanthas were often given to men who worked away from home, as magical wraps for protection, some were sold and became collectible.

Unfortunately, amidst the historical events discussed earlier, “the majority of pieces were either deliberately destroyed or used, repaired, and reused until they disintegrated. The kanthas in museum and private collections in the west and in Asia, along with those that remain in family collections in Bengal, necessarily represent only a tiny fraction of the works made over the century” (Mason, 2010, 21). This undocumented body of kanthas by its loss restricts our knowledge of women’s lives as in the absence of formal education; kantha was the chosen medium of (visual) expression. With the partition of the subcontinent and the creation of the nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947, the meaning of nationality changed significantly. A new geography of belonging and alienation was created. Partition uprooted ten million people (Hacker, 2010, 68). As Zaman also explains, the pressing problems facing the new nations vastly outweighed any question of women’s art or craft and we can see little evidence of those events in kantha:

Even Parul’s kantha, made in 1952/53, shows no signs of what happened to make many Hindus flee East Bengal. Generally, however, the women who embroidered kanthas in the past accepted their status in a world where a woman’s place was known, as well as her roles as mother and child-bearer (Zaman, 2010, 130).

Problematically, kantha in India becomes a fetishized practice evoking the past in an ideological way. As Hacker explains:

A renewal of kantha as emblematic of the endurance of cultural practice, or of the shilpi or craftsperson [is] being heralded as a symbol of Indian cultural renaissance, [but with] little critical analysis of women’s handicrafts, [alongside] the adoption of a preservationist position [amidst the] persistence of exploitative forms of production [and the viewing of] undivided Bengal as an utopic ideal. (Hacker, 2010, 75-76).

However, in the absence of women’s education and written records, kanthas remain the only records of my maternal ancestors. They offer insights into their lives and worldviews, as the embroidery can be read as their words. An examination of kantha as expressions of lived experience amidst the major changes that affected Bengal in the nineteenth to the twentieth century, challenges as much as it enlightens. My search has accessed exemplars through published sources and through visiting the collection of kanthas at IGNCA in Delhi. Because I was determined not to replicate existing works or reinstate traditional practice, I avoided listing, copying, restoring or reproducing the variety and dexterity of stitches, studying the origin of and type of threads used, or even the terminology for the various types of kanthas based on their purpose and complexity. My study sought an understanding of some of the narratives and the larger social, religious and political frameworks that effected the lives of the practitioners. I privileged conceptual frameworks inherent within the practice and have absorbed these into my own. This refers to practical solutions that utilised available material, and that reflected on daily events as related to spiritual and mythological belief systems. I studied some works more than others, looking for ways the unknown practitioner expressed individuality and play amidst the restrictions of a socially acceptable craft practice.

Also, I looked for how the natural, the personal, the domestic and the mythological came together in kantha and how the world of the maker was represented both temporally through the stylisation of natural forms, birds and animals, but also as subjective, part sacred and psychological landscapes. I welcomed densely layered and all over compositions. I enjoyed seeing different goddesses on kanthas, many that I had never known such as Goddess Ganga (as in the holy river) who has four arms and sits on a makara (a mythical fish-crocodile with the trunk of an elephant). I noted social satire and dark humour, such as of a Babu carrying his young wife or courtesan on his shoulders while pulling his frail and aged mother on a leash (Hacker, 2010, p 67, figure 3.7), and faith as in depictions of Krishna transforming himself into Kali, to protect Radha from humiliation.

This image contains copyright material. 10. Kantha, Vishnu on a horse with eight gopis, detail, maker unknown, nineteenth century, undivided Bengal, 95cm square, cotton plain weave with cotton embroidery, Stella Kramrisch Collection, Philadelphia. 1994-148- 705 (Mason, 2010, 185, plate 1).

Quirky and highly skilled depictions such as Krishna astride a horse, whose body is composed of eight women (Mason, 2010. 89, figure 4.11), astound me with their calibre as anonymous works, and I am struck by the continuity and similarity between works despite the absence of guilds or institutes expounding the tradition. The similarities in compositional layouts celebrate an abundance of life despite the historical conditions of the time: fishes are as large as tigers, elephants and deer, horses sometimes have three riders, lotus and kadamba flowers bloom as steam engines billow smoke. There are boat races, buildings and patterns, all of which appear freely drawn but are painstakingly sewn. Each motif is alive with energy that is perhaps transferred to the kantha by its maker in stitches as incantations. A central lotus with many petals and circular shapes (evoked in my work by the circular prayer wheels) is uniformly present, in works that reward repeated visits. Human bodies are tube-like with fluid arms and legs but expressive eyes, and space is considered auspicious when filled and brimming, as life in Bengal often is. The maker is not isolated from the everyday but is immersed in its sensitive observation. The works appear as colourful drawings and evidence the skill of the maker and their highly developed sense of colour. Lastly, kantha of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries advance the idea of privileging the creativity and resilience of the maker by transforming discards into cultural artefacts, instead of relying on

37 conventional art materials. This has encouraged the development of my own sustainable practice.

2.5 LIVING TRADITION

In her essay, ‘A Stake in Modernity: Brief history of Contemporary Indian Art’, Geeta Kapur describes the practice of K.G. Subramanyan, who was my own mentor and teacher at Santiniketan: An artist like Subramanyan who invents a living tradition through eclectic practice and pedagogical discourse, and who, with practical good sense, puts together a contemporary vocabulary drawing on popular and high, urban and rural, and national and international sources […] Who, moreover, while putting it together so assiduously, turns the very project about face so that in full irony the iconographies of the so-called Indian civilization are interrogated (Kapur, 1993, 40).

I understand this to be a form of active learning and examining of selected creative works, to appreciate the methods, materials, form and content, and applying these within one’s own practice but in ways that permit a questioning of what may be missing, or what one may wish to include and thereby allows risk taking in ways that are not pre-determinable. In my practice, I view tradition as made up of methods/solutions that have been tested over a long period and by many and that therefore has enough variation to provide a nuanced and well- developed body of knowledge. This could be extended by the introduction of new methods and/or relevant content, in a similar way to the evolution of language that grows when it absorbs new words and meanings to make for an inexhaustible vocabulary.

Subramanyan’s ideas of a living tradition emerged in response to the narrowing down of tradition to fit reductive nationalist agendas that also used religion as a divisive force and curtailed risk taking. As explained by Hacker:

Long associated with Kala Bhawan at Santiniketan, where he both studied and taught, Subramanyan […] engaged with the conceptual framework of living tradition and its creative possibilities. Not so much concerned with the survival of the past as with the enrichment of the present (Hacker, 2010, 77).

Tradition, in the context of kantha, was learnt inter-generationally from both a mother’s family as well as from the women and community that one married into. It relied on using existing material and mixed the sacred with the functional in a practice that permitted

38 individual variations. There were no guilds, published resources or museum exhibits to account for a tradition until kanthas began to be collected.

My own practice is associated with kantha in a way that is hybrid and that did not begin with kantha but has absorbed its strategies and ways of looking. It considers the knowledge gained as strategies by which to negotiate the personal placed within local, post-colonial and transnational currents in a search for wholeness that is open to the unholy and the unsaid. As explained by Subramanyan If art, too, has to have a real presence in today’s society and add to its quality of life […] we shall need a model within which the creative individual will be in live contact with his environment and through it the larger world- and there will be numerous creative individuals of this kind at various levels of expression. This alone makes a living tradition (K. G Subramanyan, 1987, 92-93).

2.6 SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS

In my exploration of the practices of Hall, Kimsooja and Singh, I am inspired by how they transcend from personal to universal humanitarian / environmental / cultural concerns over many years of practice and contribute unique perspectives. To my knowledge, their works have not been previously examined together and then tested or reflected upon by a creative practitioner. Coincidentally, all artists in my review have either lived or travelled in the Indian subcontinent, and Sri Lanka, though this was not the perspective from where I viewed their works. Each artist has also used materials that are unorthodox and local: the newspapers and cardboard boxes with their stamps and text in Singh’s works, the sardine cans, video tape and currency notes in Hall’s and the textiles forming bottari bundles in Kimsooja’s works. The content and subjective narratives of all three artists are layered and non-didactic. Their works are sensitive responses to concerns that belong to our time, but in a manner that exudes emotional resonance, without preaching, nor directing but by inviting contemplation. They have not restrained the size and the monumentality inherent in their works, whether as singular paintings, or encompassing entire rooms and transforming space, often in unconventional ways using digital technology and/or found objects.

In comparing their different ways of working, I have been introduced to different materials and to reflect on how I may use these within my own practice, inspired by my exposure to the principles of a ‘living tradition’. This has prompted me to explore whether I would inflict mark making that induces a certain level of violence and change to the material, or would I allow it to speak for itself through photographing the material in narrative settings. How

39 would I refine and extend my interest in sacred spaces that nurture the works and the viewer? I note how all three artists and kantha practitioners have employed local or available cultural material and have transformed this material, changed the way it is read and added new meanings. This is directly linked to my own adoption of a practice-led methodology that includes a significant awareness of tradition and history, amidst ongoing reflexivity that makes connections, absorbs information and tests new ideas.

11. Natasha Narain, 2016, Inself, kantha painting, acrylic, mixed media and collage on canvas, 90cm x 90 cm.

Chapter 3: Methodology and Processes

3.1 METHODOLOGY

The structure of my research design has privileged a balance between visual art practice and contextual exploration with a view to build on historical understanding and knowledge of the intergenerational practice of kantha so as to reflect on its significance and its connection to my own practice while also examining the work of selected artists (Fiona Hall, Kimsooja and Arpita Singh) whose practices are highly likely to make a significant and long term impact on my practice and contextualise the approaches I have taken.

I have chosen a practice-led research methodology in order to explore and advance knowledge within the paradigm of creative practice. I assume the role of a maker/investigator to fully understand the potential of kantha as both a material and a method. This has required an examination of the components integral to my own practice and can be considered as a form of action research through painting, photography, drawing, sewing, and collaging, and the co-existence of these processes within each work. It has helped me to understand why I am consistently drawn to certain materials or forms and has clarified the processes that I have developed to transform these materials or to develop content. It has explored how all of my chosen forms become interlinked by my methods of practice. The research has opened up the potential to apply these methods to new material, whether found or digital. It has thereby facilitated relationships of form and content to evolve and make or alter meanings using both traditional and non-traditional means.

This has privileged the creative process, generated new works and encouraged reflection that searches for and defines the interconnections between works, regardless of time periods. This analysis has provided an understanding of the contexts that are significant for my practice and encouraged in-depth historical and qualitative exploration of the significant underlying intergenerational tradition of the Bengali kantha. The research aimed at growing my knowledge of kantha and ways in which it could be explored and tested through practice. This required contextual research related to the context amidst which kanthas were created, a discerning appreciation of its form and content, and the application of this knowledge in the studio without direct replication or indeterminate attribution.

This cyclical reading and reflection amidst ongoing practice facilitated a better understanding of the layering of kantha and a recognition of intrinsic ways of looking and doing. It simultaneously extended the concepts and concerns (content) and their subsequent and eclectic visual solutions (forms). By exploring the complex subterranean meanings that exist under assimilated surfaces, the choice of a practice-led methodology has been fruitful in encouraging complex links to emerge between the historical, spiritual, practical, and feminist alongside the aesthetic. These links can be explored further through ongoing research.

3.2 KANTHA AS A METHOD

As I progressed through this research, I began to recognise how kantha can act as a working method for contemporary art. This section describes this journey through method.

3.2.1 Kanthas In an effort to both honour the ethos of kantha and to test it as a contemporary medium by infusing ideas of travel, migration, concentration and diffusion, place and memory, I have spent the last two years travelling and showing tangible art work, along with delivering papers and lecture presentations. Welcoming viewers to touch and examine paintings, view the books and engage with the dolls, I sought to build imperceptible human connections and concurrently deepen the tactile memory held within each work. This altered the common perception of kantha as a museum display object and restored kantha’s place within community. It also affirmed the ability of kantha to create dialogical places and to build a community as I witnessed how touching the material immediately opened respectful dialogue and broke through personal, cultural and linguistic barriers. The works acquired new meanings and stories became a bridge linking geopolitical boundaries. For example, in December 2015, I travelled to New Delhi and to Shimla (see image below) to discuss the work, in addition to exhibitions and presentations in Ballarat, Brisbane, Melbourne, Newcastle and Logan during the duration of the research.

12. Natasha Narain: 2015, Performative presentation of kantha, H.P. University, Simla. India. Image courtesy: Kesang Youdon.

On one hand, these interventions through kantha-like paintings are linked to emerging narratives of cultural complexity beyond a mono-cultural identity. On the other hand, this way of direct engagement provided me with rich material that allowed for the local and the current, amidst a sharing of common concerns and of life narratives. These are relevant considering my own distance in time and place, from narratives in existing kanthas. I have thereby considered the conversations as capable of becoming a work in themselves, as demonstrated in the work W.O.R.D.S (2014-2015).

W.O.R.D.S became a quilt of conversations that would, in traditional quilting, remain only in memory, superseded by visual motifs. I saw myself as a witness, a role that Zaman describes when discussing the Kantha practitioner, who, embroidering her kantha was both a witness and preserver of the moment of impact of East and West. The advent of the British is recorded […] at the same time, the old traditions formed an intrinsic part of the ethos […] it was a world close to nature [but] it was also a world that absorbed and assimilated diverse impressions (Zaman 2010, 130). This agency as a collector of impressions is crucial to my own understanding of Kantha as a working method, however I remain acutely aware of the historical position of these women. Ultimately, my methodological application of kantha is best summarised by Ghosh’s description of the traditions dynamic: Kanthas are highly dynamic, sharing the improvisational quality of conversations themselves, and embodying individual agency and relational value. They become repositories of memories of particular makers, givers, recipients, and owners: of the used, repaired, and preserved: and of the intricate networks of relationships initiated,

activated, transmuted or even challenged in particular contexts of giving and using (Ghosh, 2010, 32).

13. Natasha Narain, 2014. Artist in residence at Logan Village Library, as part of community engagement, W.O.R.D.S. “Homesickness Project”, Mentors: Kevin Leong & Elizabeth Woods. Image credit: Kevin Leong. http://www.homesickness.org.au/cms/project/logan-art-gallery http://www.homesickness.org.au/cms/project/words

3.2.2 Collage Kathleen Vaughan’s research on collage as an interdisciplinary method describes the juxta- positioning (placing or gluing) of an image or object onto an existing work as a strategy to create new meanings. She refers to Picasso’s use of this method to suggest the changes/ disruptions within his own time. Vaughan also explains how collage lends itself to digital processes and film as a kind of braiding or mixing together and is no longer restricted to works on paper or on canvas (Vaughan, 2005, 3-4). Brockelman explains collage as a process that permits:

The gathering of materials from different worlds [to] call attention to the irreducible heterogeneity of the ‘postmodern condition’ [.] Collage depends upon a new kind of relationship between these two shards of the traditional concept of worldhood – and as a result, it promises a new sense of truth and experience (Brockelman, 2001, 10-11).

Harding proposes collage as a model for a “borderlands epistemology” that values non- Eurocentric, multicultural, feminist and alternate ways of “organizing the production of knowledge and thus, conceptual themes that cultures have developed” and that consequently offers a postcolonial strategy for broadening the scope of Western knowledge (Harding,1996, 19, 22). Harding explains:

The goal of such an epistemology is not to try to integrate them all into one maximally ideal knowledge system, for such a process would necessarily lose the advantage of the conflicting […]conceptual schemes that cultures have developed.[Just as] Multicultural feminisms focus on the distinct political histories and practices shaping women’s conditions, interests, and desires in different local, national, and transnational cultures and the necessity for thinking about these distinctive histories in designing social change.[As] knowledge for women and their activities does not completely coincide with knowledge for men and their activities (Harding, 1996, 23-24).

14. Natasha Narain, 2013-2016, detail of collage from three kantha paintings.

In my own practice, I use collage to impart narrative to abstract colour or pattern and to test new relationships by drawing on its ability to open up discussion on multiple and opposing truths as coexisting contemporaneously. This challenges normativity and honours multiple truths, worldviews and realities. It does so by acknowledging the repressed stories of the marginalised and the shifting fluidity of political borders, and by creating visual equivalents of micronarratives. Collage offers a visual means to refer to my experience of displacement and migration as an acquiescent but abrupt change in place, language, and physical reality. That disorients time, schedules, and swiftly changes what is culturally valued and expected. This shift renders previous truths meaningless but also induces the feeling that it is somehow possible to make one’s life meaningful again. So, in my practice, I become both the outside agent and the marginalised other in a process of assimilation and reparation. To research this effect, I increasingly make my own images such as photographs from my life and

45 environment, places that I travel to, people that I meet or see, photographs of existing works, and these images are collaged onto ongoing works.

Through action research, I observe that collaged images can appear on the surface, as disconnected and transient, be painted over and subsumed into the patterned background (dominant culture), or a third and newly emerging option where the entity is neither incongruous nor extinguished, but is present as a part of the overall structure. This is a visual reflection of my own identity as a bridge between places and cultures and the broader experience of diaspora. My use of collage employs a strategy of mapping inherent to kantha.

A traditional kantha maker was a witness to social and cultural changes and created new motifs with which to reflect their time. They observed and drew in new and (for that time) incongruous elements, such as a train, an Englishman on his horse, or women in crinoline dresses. These became motifs amidst otherwise timeless and mythological settings, as visual records of the outside (world) having entered Bengal.

15. Natasha Narain, 2014-2016, Kalpa Vriksha, Kantha painting, oil, mixed media and collage on un-stretched canvas, 180 x 100cm, Image Courtesy: Carl Warner.

In the case of women in my own family, I am the third generation that has lived away from Bengal, and as memories faded over time, we lost access to the strategies of self-reflexive presentation offered by kantha. Through the opportunity made possible by this research, what

46 appeared as compulsive workings of the unconscious have been mostly decoded and made available as a visual language.

3.2.3 Bricolage The related concept of bricolage refers to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of materials that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process. As this allows for unusual, discarded, found, given or inherited things and materials to be reused as art material, it encourages a sustainable and eclectic practice, and answers to a hybrid and postmodern outlook. When the materials come together, they are not held back by their original meanings but can be ascribed new meanings and provide new and previously untried visual solutions. This facilitates an intertextuality and a layering that is conducive to myth making and an opportunity to integrate a variety of knowledge sets to produce innovative works that are complex (Klages, 2012, 12). This is an active method of collecting, reassembling or transforming found materials in practice with meanings arrived at after completion.

Bricolage is employed by Fiona Hall, for example, through her collection of currency, cans, video tape, clocks, or organic items collected from nature as a range of disconnected ‘stuff’ that form the material base of her practice. Using the materials in a non-traditional way to become something else is only possible through an appreciation of the physicality of the material and the ability to respond and steadfastly work through its inherent possibilities. In doing so, Hall allows the material to take on new meanings and associations, and to become a part of a higher purpose that transforms a body of works into visual articulations of her concerns. Concurrently, the material also adds information on place and time. For instance, video tape changed from being treasured to being superseded by compact discs in the late 1990s and Hall’s work Slash and Burn from 1997 pulls tape out of its case and then knits exquisite and delicate faces with the tape. This layers in the weaving, dexterity, patience and time inherent to women’s craft practice, but the final presentation as an installation in a gallery space makes a moving statement on larger issues of riots and humanitarian loss. Arpita Singh employs text printed on cardboard boxes, packaging and detritus as well as newspapers and maps, not directly working on these materials, but replicating their surfaces in her paintings in appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of non-traditional material and their

47 reconfiguration and arrangement, to make new meanings, as layered collage-bricolage and painting.

In my practice, I collect objects that hold memories for me, such as discarded hard bound books, letters, wooden chairs with marks and dents, wooden drawers, plain (not patterned) cotton and silk dresses and fabric, wooden cable wheels, dolls, bottle caps and natural materials such as peeled barks and pebbles. The materials are repurposed: drawers become mini installations and boxes for dolls, the cable wheels become prayer wheels, the chairs become plinths for artist’s books, or are used in dioramas with the dolls. The dolls take on new identities and the dresses become anthropomorphic. These transformations occur through new juxtapositions and associations, and a process of washing and painting that allows new meanings to eventuate.

Painting and drawing on the material brings a contemplative oneness where the potential and limits of the material are opened. For instance, nails, nets, small icons, and postage stamps are layered onto a painted cable wheel or an artist’s book. A doll’s dress is removed and replaced by painted bubble wrap and prayer beads. The works take on a hybrid and postmodern appearance where material collected in Brisbane and in Delhi come together. For example, Indian brocade is opened up to reveal its layers and draped on the large blue doll from a local source. Bricolage allows my practice to create bodies of works that are capable of their own narrative myths.

My recent installation (Mapping Nurture, 2016) was effectively a large-scale bricolage of disparate elements within my practice to be placed in the same room, in compartments of the similar. However, as I used the gallery space as a workspace, I carried and moved works where the dolls sometimes sat on the wheels, read a book, or were placed against a painting, which altered and extended meanings. This fluidity is a potential that I have not explored to its capacity and will form a part of my ongoing research in the future.

3.3 RELATED RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

To increase my awareness of the research being conducted by my peers, to increase research impact and to invite critical feedback, I participated in conferences and exhibitions that presented and tested my own research. Doing so has helped me to test the relevance but has also given me some practice in structuring an argument and working through the challenge of looking at the problem from different vantage points to suit the theme of each conference, or exhibition, as listed below:

Conferences:

• Narain, Natasha. 2016. “Reactivating kantha from loss to perpetuation,” paper presented at Work in Progress Conference: On the Edge, 27-28 September, University of Queensland School of Communication and Arts, Brisbane, QLD. • Narain, Natasha. 2016. “A goddess of resilience from a cross cultural creative practice,” paper presented at The Australian Women's and Gender Studies Biennial International Conference, Destorying the Joint: debating feminism, politics and the media in Australia, 29 June-1 July, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD. • Narain, Natasha. 2016. “Reactivating Kantha,” paper presented at Symposium: Students in Creative Arts Research: exploring frameworks and models for the creative thesis, 7-9 April, DDCA and University of Newcastle, NSW. • Narain, Natasha. 2015. “Travelling across borders with my kantha,” paper presented at Ballarat International Photo Biennale Symposium: Borderless Futures, Reimaging the Citizen, 29 August, Photography Studies College, Ballarat, Victoria.

Seminars and guest lectures:

• Visual Arts Post Graduate Research Seminars, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT, Brisbane (24 May 2016). Exploring reactivation of ‘Bengali Kantha’ into a cross- cultural contemporary practice. • Nine Schools of Art, Shahpur Jat, New Delhi, India. (26 December 2015). Travelling across borders with my Kanthas.

• Australia India Institute, Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, India. (22 December 2015). Performative presentation of Kantha paintings.

Book Chapter:

Narain Natasha. 2016. “Reflections on identity, tradition and reconfiguration”, in Narratives of estrangement and belonging: Indo Australian Perspectives edited by Dr Neelima Kanwar, 260-276, Authors Press: New Delhi, ISBN 9789352073931.

Exhibitions/ Professional practice:

Solo shows 2016 Mapping Nurture: The Reparation Project, Frank Moran Gallery, QUT, Brisbane. 2015 Ma: Artist’s book presentation, QUT Library, Kelvin Grove, Brisbane.

Workshop 2015 Kitabart: Conducted an Artist’s Book Workshop, F.I.C.A (Federation of Indian Contemporary Art) as the educational arm of Vadehra Art Gallery, Defence Colony, New Delhi.

Group shows 2016 Excerpts: Curated by Mark Webb, The Block, QUT, Brisbane. 2016 Religious Art Prize: Chapel on Station Gallery, Box Hill, Melbourne. 2016 Chroma: Beth Hulme Gallery, Melbourne. 2016 Four Walls, Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne. 2015 We Wear Future: Virgin Australia Fashion Festival, Brunswick Street Gallery, Melbourne. 2015 The Homesickness Project: Logan Art Gallery, Logan. 2014 W.O.R.D.S. In Situ art-sign installation, Logan Village precinct. 2014 Artist at Logan Village Library. Community engagement project.

3.4 REFLECTION

16. Natasha Narain: 2016. Excerpts. Curated by Mark Webb, The Block, QUT. Image Courtesy: QUT Creative Industries Faculty.

A reconnection with and an understanding of kantha has made sense of my instinctive disposition to present the world in playful drawings and patterns interconnected by marks, and to view discards as art material. A consideration of kantha as a visual language rather than as a tradition to be exactingly replicated, has opened my practice to look for symbols, stories, images, patterns and subjects with which to make meaning from my own time and place. The study of past works of kantha makes apparent a similarity in concern and care for family, humanity and nature alongside a love of narrative storytelling and how women witness the world around them and find ways to depict wholeness through stories, patterns and impressions. I have concluded also that, as with the pattern and decoration movement in western feminist art, kantha offers the potential as a long-standing women’s practice to include stories and aspects of lived experience that are more inclusive of contemporary issues and feminist perspectives. Kantha has offered me strategies to represent the sacred alongside the everyday and the temporal. It has facilitated a reflexive and portable method of making place, and of continuous practice through change: a way to include events witnessed or experienced, in a manner that is playfully whimsical and layered, as evidenced by works that I have created through the research period.

My practice-led reconnection with the methods of kantha has acknowledged the link between found or existing material and the viability of my practice, where I work with intuitive/ impulsive collection of images, found objects and ephemeral material to explore how they can be transformed or presented as art. This approach echoes the sustainable methods used by a kantha practitioner, and allows the practice to thrive regardless of funds available. It is as if the materials feed my practice in an unhurried and organic way, for an eventual transition and transformation, like the collecting of borders from sarees and recycling of embroidered patches onto new kantha works. A kantha practitioner is a keen witness and observer of her surroundings and this research has opened methods by which to negotiate/weave contradictory positions, changed circumstances, and extremities of experience, where everything is interconnected by swirling lines and stitch-like marks. Encouraging touch has opened up conversations and created memories, and the rolling and unrolling of kantha paintings has also taken on aspects of ritual, in a process not unlike the turning of pages of a vast book made up of many layers.

My study has made me aware of efforts that have already been made to revive kantha after Bangladesh became an independent nation in 1971, as well as its reappearance in Santiniketan (Birbhum District) in West Bengal. It has made clear how kantha has always been an intrinsic part of my practice and opened possibilities for further integrating kantha with digital technology. I have tried to bring kantha to the attention of other artists, peers and academics in seminars and talks and created a place and awareness of its potential, internationally. I have not solely pursued its replication as a form of sentimental diasporic reconnection, but immersed it within other mediums such as photography, artists’ books, doll goddesses and paintings, to draw from its essence and to reactivate it as a self-reflexive practice.

17.Natasha Narain, 2015, Body, kantha painting, oil, collage and mixed media on un-stretched canvas,175 x 100cm. Image Courtesy: Carl Warner.

Chapter 4: Creative Work

The creative outcomes of my project aimed at a polyphonous braiding of what at the outset appeared as dissimilar and divergent methods of visual art practice: an interdisciplinary and contemporary practice with its mainstay in painting, an interest in photography, soft sculpture and artists’ books, yet choosing to explore a traditional stitch based craft practice, the methods and meaning of which were mostly unknown or unavailable to me. This required a consideration of all mediums, instead of a simple transplanting of motifs or return to embroidery only. The work was aiming to achieve polyphony within singular works (microcosms), followed by their combined presentation as an installation (macrocosm) without clearly knowing what the outcomes would be. A persistent voice within me insisted that my answers lay in risking a link in these part unknowns.

4.1 CANVAS PAINTING

18A. Natasha Narain, 2016. Kantharsis, detail, kantha painting. Acrylic and mixed media, collage on unframed canvas. H 90cm L 90 cm.

In continuing to paint while examining visual work (form) and published writing (content) on kantha, I consciously noted my thoughts and found that I constantly negotiated binaries such as the said/unsaid, inside/outside, political history/personal history, philosophy/popular religion, memories/losses, and nurturing/emptiness. This practice required meditative isolation, but its outcome was reparative and elevating.

18B. Natasha Narain, 2016, Kantharsis, detail. (The building up of automatic lines, the inclusion of narratives, the colours aid in the creating of cathartic and psychological landscapes).

While painting, I tried to empty my mind by allowing concerns to flow and to intermingle without consciously privileging one over the other, in a contemplative focusing on as well as a letting go. By doing so, carefully drawn lines, circles, flowers and patterns were overtaken by energetic and aggressive lines, by scratches and attempts at erasure and camouflage, digging deeper into the canvas as if to open up the surface and break through the pattern. Sometimes the new layer would float on top of the old, providing visual intricacy in a variety of lines of different thicknesses, well-formed or scratched in. The collaging in of images imparted multiple meanings interlinked as multiple stories and reminded me of a Kalpa Vriksha or living tree as a kantha: vast, old and with many parts that could offer detailed study, but where all components are also linked within one structure. This structure was simultaneously affected by its surroundings and yielded to other narratives and patterns, dissolving and reappearing as if playing hide and seek, in ways that challenged my control and conformity to a singular meaning.

Instead of stitching as a kantha practitioner would, when I used my own photographic images, I immersed the photo in a tray filled with warm tap water then peeled the white paper behind the photo, crushed and crumpled the thinned almost transparent photo so it developed creases and then pasted or stitched it onto the canvas, in a manner similar to applique and textile practices. The collaged in images were further painted over to assimilate them within the canvas (as if to weave them in). The stories were partly autobiographical, or seen and felt (similar to a kantha) but sometimes there was no clear story and I allowed myself to be immersed within the colours, textures and mark making as similar to what Pika Ghosh noted in her interactions with kantha practitioners Amima and Banasree Nag Chaudhari in Sagar, West Bengal:

They described the addictive pleasure (nesha) when one really gets into embroidering, often staying up too late at night, or working in the dim glow of candlelight. They reminisced how hard it was to put the emerging motif aside as it was flowering (phuthe otha), or as the fingers got into the rhythm of executing the running stitch with precision […] the acute physical sensation is very personal, an intimate reconnecting with oneself. The nostalgia for that feeling of exhilaration arising from the engagement of mind and body was easily visible […] they recalled being chided for neglecting […] daily domestic duties as they relished their quiet time in the silence of the night (Ghosh, 2009, 43).

19A. Natasha Narain, 2011-2014, My Family Tree, (early stage resembling a kantha), employing applique, collage, stitch, mixed media on un-stretched canvas. 180 x 100cm. Image Credit: Carl Warner.

19B. Natasha Narain, 2011-2014, My Family Tree, completed kantha painting, Acrylic, collage, stitch and mixed media on un-stretched canvas, clipped onto painted wooden board. 180 x 100cm. Image Credit: Carl Warner.

Mindful of the compositional layout of a kantha, I would draw a central flowering mandala that resembled a prayer wheel, but in time this was painted over, extended to the periphery or displaced somewhere in between, dissolving into a liminal space, reflecting my own displacement from a centre. Where travel has made me view the world from multiple perspectives, and left me with a sense that perhaps I shall always inhabit an in between space: a diasporic place, traversing between the known and many unknowns. My paintings negotiate the surface of my temporal reality and a subterranean within – while reawakening personal and cultural memory to engender cathartic healing. Emerging from a void within, loss and its darkness, along with sometimes biased and unreliable memory, became agents for a reconnection with self and with family history. Lines weaving and un-weaving created boundaries and opened borders while revealing time as fluid and cyclic. Resembling mind maps, the paintings are holders of memories, nostalgia, the many intersections between lines flowing automatically from microcosms within me that subconsciously travel to macrocosms without, as if to reconnect and to heal from many displacements. These flows mark non- linear time through lines as stitches on never-ending quilts, overlapping remembered events, stories, and emotions. Simultaneously, I questioned whether my circumstances allowed me a perspective of distance that permitted respectful reconfiguration of kantha through painting,

57 whether I could draw from extremities of experience and trauma without resorting to the abject, and whether I could play a polyphonous tune with kantha in a manner that also refreshed and extended both the method and my creative practice.

4.2 THE DOLLS

Over time, I have moved away from worshipping or following goddesses within my own Hindu heritage, but through this research, I questioned my reasons for doing so. I hypothesised that a reconnection was possible through my art practice without quite knowing how this was to eventuate or why this was a crucial link in restoring a feeling of being whole. Having grown up in a Brahmin household in India, the associated rituals and chanting from prayer books (often attributed to goddesses) are part of my sonic, visual and intergenerational memory, but I found myself questioning the relevance of attributes that conveyed extremes of behaviour between warrior aggression and subservience as they did not remedy the extremities imposed on many women or relate meaningfully with their (or my own) lived experiences. I questioned the conformity to ideals of beauty, purity and a virtuous maternal often achieved by silencing or erasing shame, loss or darkness. This led me to an appreciation of the structure on which Goddess mythology is based, as explained by Paul Reid-Bowen:

the three aspects of the Goddess, Maiden-Mother-Crone [are] theologically understood not only to be pre-and post-patriarchal models of female identity, but also a dynamic whole: three aspects of a unity […] analogous to patterns and regularities occurring elsewhere within nature. Thus, images of the Triple Goddess, are closely associated with the cycles of the moon (Maiden as the waxing moon, Mother as the full, Crone as the waning) and the movement of the seasons (Maiden as spring, Mother as summer, Crone as autumn) (Reid-Bowen, 2016, 68-69).

20. Natasha Narain:2010-2016, Doll Goddesses, various, singular, in test installations & together.

This inspired a growing interest in tripartite goddesses that embody multiple truths, and are usually older and known to nurture their believers through loss and darkness. In practice, I saw my dolls evolving into inhabitants of multiple truths, residing between reality and myth. They appeared both contained and liberated, local and transcultural, young and simultaneously, old.

I was determined to make each one a little different even though they had once been mostly similar and factory produced. I did this by being sensitive to subtle differences between them: of size, body shape, colour of hair, skin and eyes and by observing their gesture, so as to consider how I could draw attention to their inherent identity. I allowed myself to be intuitive and transgressive by painting over skin, chopping hair, undressing, dressing with discards, submerging in dye, layering with text, and varnishing. In doing so, I witnessed the dolls’ transformation and found this reparative, having permitted intuitive and sensitive play that freed me from my own filters, whether inherited or experiential. This led to the creation of a large body of new doll goddesses as artworks, linked to kantha in that its makers also explored and expressed the female sacred. My own goddesses have not one but a list of names. Chanting these names’ multiple attributes and ethnicities come together as sounds reminiscent of the Devi Mahatamya, and I hope in the future to extend on this by creating further mythology of my own, with stories from my own time and represented by my doll goddesses.

Perhaps my process seeks what Julia Kristeva describes as an inclusion of the dirty, polluting and inadequate: The negative and borderline values of contaminating objects are reversible, and reverse themselves into omnipotent and positive values. […] that is why the author of the Atharva –Veda exalts the remnant as at once contaminating and regenerative […] on the remnant is founded the world (Kristeva,1997, 92-93).

By transforming and reviving the dolls, I exercised a kantha maker’s skill in nurture and transformation. Dressing and undressing them explores my part diasporic, part immersed, hybrid identity. The undressing removes the strictures of a given identity after a long and arduous journey, and the washing, painting, and varnishing allows the doll to speak and to change its identity/ethnicity in a playful way. They reappear in my paintings as photographs and install themselves in dioramas, imparting context to their persona.

21A. Natasha Narain, 2016. Mapping Nurture, Central Shrine, Frank Moran Gallery. Image Credit: Carl Warner

21B. Natasha Narain. 2016. Mapping Nurture, The Dolls rested at Night on the cloth I worked on during the day.

In Mapping Nurture: The Reparation Project, the installation permitted my doll goddesses to be arranged in the centre and assert their presence. They could be together, in conversation with each other, as a community in formation, revelling in their rejuvenated and transformed empowerment. Sitting, standing, lying down (metaphorically walking, dancing, studying, playing, eating, teaching), they appeared to be breathing and culturally indeterminate, feminist and spiritual with hair shorn or wild, not nude or voluptuous or inviting the male gaze, their gestures were that of nurture and healing, maternal and always exceptionally kind.

21C Natasha Narain, 2016, Dolls, detail, various, Mapping Nurture, Image Courtesy: Carl Warner

The interrelationships between the dolls and the paintings is still unfolding. I ask myself whether the paintings are the landscapes that the dolls shall hereon roam on and how they may become protagonists. They have been collaged in as in the images below, but in a digital realm, will they become bigger and activated and will they live in the paintings? An outcome of my research has also been that I am no longer searching for images as I used to, since the dolls and paintings will impart narrative to ongoing and future works.

22. Natasha Narain, a doll as a photograph, collaged into My Family Tree: kantha painting. Image Credit: Karen Milder.

4.3 PRAYER WHEELS

23. Natasha Narain, 2016, Prayer wheels, painted kantha on canvas, doll parts, installed for Mapping Nurture, Frank Moran Gallery, Image Credit: Carl Warner.

Predating my research into kantha but continued through it, the wheels help me to realise the continuity and link between disparate elements of my practice. While searching for a portable alternative to stretched or framed canvas, I came across cable wheels in Reverse Garbage in Brisbane, in an affordable and abundant supply. Also functioning as mandalas, they became a part of my practice for over ten years. Once sealed and primed they permit writing, drawing, painting, nailing and collage, while the wheel is turned by hand. Each wheel offers an opportunity to try a different technique and over time, they have served as test works for methods that are carried over to the artist’s books and paintings. The mandalas or prayer wheels are echoed in the circles, dots and patterns in my canvas paintings, but in the wheels, they challenge preconceived compositions or linear story telling. They encourage automatic drawing and patterning and allow time to become cyclic as the past, the present and the future can coexist and be returned to with each turn of the wheel, and in doing so they welcome readings from changeable vantage points. The prayer wheels answered my need to make portable works that can be easily stacked for storage but then spread to make a place. Playful as a vast jigsaw the pieces are interrelated but do not fit to make any one story. In layering my paintings under them, placing dolls and objects on them, the wheels allow narratives that come about by accident but that refresh the readings. Researching into my almost compulsive need to make these mandala-like works, I came to see them linked to alpana practices of my

63 maternal ancestors. Dr Stella Kramrisch explains alpanas as magic diagrams that were a part of the ritual art of women:

The art of painting on the floor […] is the prerogative of women. Its traditions are handed down from mother to daughter […] it scares away evil spirits. […] They are intuited and functional diagrams transmitted by women. [...] In the Vrata Alpana of eastern India, the hopes and wishes of the artist are precipitated into the designs on the floor (Kramrisch, 1939, 105-111). To transfer these practices to a contemporary time and setting, the placement of the wooden wheels in the centre of the gallery and on a wooden floor honoured memories within the space seen as marks on the floor and as consecration of the space itself. The placement in the centre evoked a kantha with its central lotus that radiates energy out to the four corners but, reflective of my own displacement the lotus or central mandala was made of many wheels, or petals that were connected and displaced into what appeared as a moving and asymmetric form. This was representative of my own identity linked to my past, open to my present and searching for hybrid meanings. I felt my purpose also lay in linking the Frank Moran Gallery’s past as an Army Mess hall (a connection with my late father, who served in the Army) to the room’s church like architecture and to its new purpose as a place for reflection and art. Soon after, the wheels resonated vibrantly from the dark floors of the Block, at QUT, revelling in the large space and the dramatic lighting, and a secular sacred place was thus created.

24A. Natasha Narain, 2006- 2016, Prayer Wheels, mixed media on wood, canvas and doll parts, as an Installation for Mapping Nurture, Frank Moran Gallery, Image credit: Carl Warner. 24B in Excerpts, curated by Mark Webb, The Block, QUT, Brisbane. Image Credit: Creative Industries Faculty.

4.4 ARTIST’S BOOKS

25. Natasha Narain, 2014, Unhallowed, artist’s book, mixed media on found book, Installation on found chair, Mapping Nurture, Frank Moran Gallery, Image Credit: Carl Warner.

Artist books offer an extension of continuous practice amidst displacement or travel. For me they began with a chance meeting with E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, found in a hardbound version in a second-hand shop in Paddington. A book that I recalled reading in my teenage years in India, its words, characters, places and sentiments appealed to the diasporic in me. However, as I began reading, the distance that I had travelled became evident in my disagreement with the attitudes and cultural conditioning, and a colonial viewpoint of the

‘exotic other’ that the book revealed in prose otherwise compellingly rich in imagery.

My process of analysis began within reading: as an underline, a circling, and a notation. From there the book became a viable surface on which to draw, paint, stain, and one that accepted tearing, erasure, re-marking, scratching, and inking over, to destroy existing meanings in what most would consider a defilement, but was done with care, in a calm and nurturing manner, instinctively carried out in the quiet of a studio. Other books followed, exploring ideas such as of the passage of time, memories, maternal care, and some even contained my own writing. The works express a love for both the content and materiality of books as objects that hold meaning and as rich surfaces to work with. Over time, collaging in of photographs of my kantha paintings extended the narrative possibilities and connected both approaches.

26. Natasha Narain, 2013-2014, Womb, Artist’s Book, detail, mixed media, collage, stitch, on found book. (H 22cm, L 16cm D 8cm). Image Credit: Carl Warner.

27. Natasha Narain, 2012-2015, Mother and Passage to India, Artist’s Books, mixed media, collage and stitch on found books. (Mother: H20cm L12cm D 5 cm. Passage to India: H 22cm, L 16cm, D 10cm). Image Credit: Carl Warner.

4.5 INSTALLATION AND SOUND

Presentation

28. Natasha Narain, 2016, Installation, Kantha paintings, dolls, prayer wheels, Mapping Nurture, Frank Moran Gallery, Image Courtesy: Carl Warner.

The exhibition, Mapping Nurture: The Reparation Project, Frank Moran Gallery at QUT, allowed a coming together of different but interconnected elements within my practice. Conceptually drawing on the notion of an activated kantha quilt, the arrangement of the works broadly related to the compositional layout of a conventional kantha without being strictly adherent to its symmetry. The presentation also created a sacred space that approximated a temple, an altar, a shrine, an alpana, in a mingling of Brahmanical with Vrata, Hindu and Catholic, while also being an art installation. The large kantha paintings were not framed or attached to the walls of the gallery. Instead, as a way to honour their portability, they were clipped onto MDF sheets that rested on sawhorses from the workshop next door. The sheets were painted burnt umber to suggest a connection to the earth, and to the terracotta temples of Bengal that have narrative reliefs on their external walls. The dolls could be free as they were not held down by metal supports or silenced as curiosities inside glass cabinets. Artist books rested on chairs and the wheels approximated the central lotus of a kantha and gave the appearance of movement, as their overall shape was asymmetrical. I had tried various ways of displaying the works beforehand, but felt this arrangement best suited the context of kantha. It created a sacred space and facilitated a circumambulation

67 around the wheels as one viewed the kantha paintings. This manner of displaying large works and the freedom allowed the dolls, books and wheels encouraged me to take risks that respected the gallery space but honoured the works to become themselves instead of complying with more conventional methods of display. Additionally, I could set up a table and continue working, in what became a performative workspace.

29. Natasha Narain.2016. Images from Mapping Nurture: Frank Moran Gallery. Image Credit: Carl Warner.

Artist books were arranged on found and repainted chairs that had been left out on the street after the 2011 floods in Brisbane. Visitors could sit on the chairs to read or view a book and they were simultaneously a plinth that could be reused at home or in my studio. The chairs reminded me /dwelled on my episodic memory of the floods, an event that was both personal and local. By salvaging, cleaning, repairing, painting and re purposing, they became bodies that offered a contemplation of loss and renewal. As I worked on them I deliberated on their journey from being valued to being discarded and wondered who may have once sat on these chairs, or read these books. I did not cover up dents, marks, stains and scratches. In doing so, I hoped the viewer could access emotional content retained by the surfaces of the books and the chairs.

A dress that was drawn on, dyed, varnished, collaged into and ready to become a large doll body, kept me company, resting against a cotton saree that belonged to my mother, both inviting viewers to feel the cotton of a kantha and allowing me to keep family close to my workspace within the gallery.

30. Natasha Narain, Nadine’s dress. 2016, Mapping Nurture, Frank Moran Gallery, Image Courtesy: Carl Warner

31A. Natasha Narain, 2015-2016, Test Installations at H & Z Block, QUT, Brisbane.

31B. Natasha Narain: 2015-2016. Images from my Studio at QUT, Brisbane.

The added introduction of sound that did not belong to a recognisable language but to human voice and musical instruments, helped fill in the interstices between works as I worked on the tablecloth in the workspace, or read a book. The music, by Icelandic post-rock band, Sigur Rós, linked my studio to the gallery space, with sounds that flowed through both. I found their unique Hopelandish language (made up of sounds not words where the listener can make up their own lyrics) from the album Valtari (2012) particularly apt. This idea was tested in the installation, as viewers were not provided with a textual explanation, didactics or titles but had to spend time with the works to see embedded narratives, and the meanings were left open. Adding to the viewer’s engagement was my own presence, which enabled an opportunity for

70 conversation and discussion of my work. This allowed me an opportunity to listen to views of visiting academics and artists, and has provided me with valuable feedback. Visitors observed the structure in paintings as fluid; the apparent movement of the wheels; inherent similarities to Australian indigenous art; and the collaged, hidden narratives that changed each time they revisited the work. They had visceral responses to the colours and the presence of near living dolls, but some also found it a calming place despite the many works being present. They commented on the effect of the diffused incense placed in a ceramic jug, their desire to play with the dolls and to enjoy a small chocolate treat on each visit, and they provided suggestions for music and other artist’s works, all of which was greatly helpful, in that it allowed meaningful conversations and a validation of my practice.

Additionally, as I worked late into the evening, I listened to Devi Mahatamya recordings and felt connected to the Durga Puja festival that was concurrently occurring in Kolkata, as these are sounds that a kantha practitioner would have also listened to. The gallery space, with its wooden floorboards resembled lines of running stitches, becoming a kantha installation. The dolls purporting as part divinity, some androgynous, every day and allegorical, were confidently assertive as a group, celebrating their growing family. Obviously, these were not presented as a quietened collection placed within glass cases as in a museum, nor made to stand still on metal supports. Visitors were welcome to pick up, to touch, and to rearrange the dolls, but few did, except for children who sat on the floor with me and discussed possible stories.

The installation also engaged with an exploration of an active and dynamic centre, which was layered and changeable. Neither completely moving towards the corners and the periphery, nor staying still in the centre. The mandalas, prayer wheels or alpanas were individual works that became connected with the other, echoing the dolls that presented more strongly as a

collective and employed similar notions of changeability and movement. This coming together of the works in their public presentation has allowed me to explore deeper into the intersection between myself, my heritage and my current life and times. It has allowed an interrogation of diverse narratives that have helped me to transform feelings of isolation into

a sense of belonging.

32. Natasha Narain, 2016, Central Shrine, Mapping Nurture, Frank Moran Gallery.

Chapter 5: Conclusion

33. Natasha Narain, 2014-2016, Kashmir, detail from final stage, kantha painting, oil, mixed media, stitch and collage on unframed canvas. 180 x 100 cm.

On a personal level, this research has allowed me a means to reconnect and validate my roots and to recuperate from displacement and personal losses enmeshed within collective trauma. More broadly, this approach offers a means to revisit personal and collective history, to repair from losses within intergenerational memory and in the process, to create emerging visual strategies that are centred within ideas of nurture and community. Addressing the experience of diaspora, my suitcase has allowed me to carry my canvases as folded kanthas, along with dolls and artist’s books and permitted a continuation of practice amidst change. This allowed me to gain a sense of how other women would have felt in their forced displacement. I engaged with ideas of cultural transference, whereby the meaning of artworks changed and accrued new interpretations. Borrowing the portability of a kantha, in each unfolding of my kantha paintings I endeavoured to allegorically connect geo-political boundaries by bringing my personal and metamorphic imagery to the site: one world within another, linking the

73 inside to the outside. I have already begun to imagine how this process could be extended in the future.

34. Natasha Narain, 2015, Kantha paintings unrolled and made accessible, Nine Schools of Art, New Delhi. Image Credit: Samudra Kajal Saikia. http://nineschoolsofart.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/weaving-memories-artist-natasha-narain.html

To the future: sound and the digital What I found missing in the creative outcomes of this research was a proper exploration of sound as way to explore the sacred. In the future, I would like to explore transformative sounds that are not from a language of words but of feeling, body and historical memory, with the intention of intensifying emotional transference of feeling.

To explore digitisation, I have started to photograph existing works, focussing on fragments that hold subjective narrative or pattern, and am making small video recordings from my own environment with a view to build new digital work from these studies. I am curious to see how these would open new associations and meanings, removed from their existing locations, but connected by mark making (stitched together). I look forward to playing with scale: large immersive installations that allow the collaging in of small fragments, and as previously mentioned, the infusion of sound for greater sensory impact. Digital technology also offers different possibilities for exploring touch. For instance, combining various works into a digital book or interactive projections on screens in public spaces could enable intimate contact by viewers in any location. I am also looking at ways to activate and enlarge my dolls, so they can live in the painted kanthas. In terms of the innovative transformation of tradition into digital mediums, future research will examine the works of Shazia Sikander. Her intriguing subject matter at times drawn from recognisable kantha motifs, (such as Krishna riding a horse that is made up of the bodies of gopis, or cowherd women) but where

Sikander symbolically sets them free by virtually drawing out strands of their hair in her Gopi Contagion (2005), make her an excellent subject of study.

In addition, I will extend my research by closely examining Nalini Malani’s works across a range of mediums that include painting, writing, video and installation, and consider how literary sources, historical events and contemporary dialogues are interpreted and played out in her works. Both artists draw from their roots in South Asia as well as from transcultural sources, and a study of their practices shall extend my research into women’s perspectives from the region. The principles of reparation and restitution touched on in this body of research can also be further theorised as I translate kantha principles into the digital realm.

35. Natasha Narain. 201. Images (actual and digitally manipulated) of the cotton sheet, drawn on during Mapping Nurture.

During this project, I investigated the connection between the traditionally female craft of kantha, the social history of Bengal, the artists in my contextual review, and my own creative practice as research. I found a shared interest in exploring the layers and overlaps between material and non-material culture, and observed how a distinctive creative voice emerges. I began to appreciate how significantly history and material culture have formed my identity

75 and how these flow into my practice and my ways of making meaning. That which seems automatic can also be traced back to inherited ways of practice and thinking. As an artist, my challenge has been to explore the interstices between the known and the unknown through making, where each mark records a life breath, a moment in time and a seed, holding potential. This work reflects on what gives our lives meaning, and whether meaning is a linear or singular truth or multiple, blurred and overlapping truths. I have had to acknowledge how all that is familiar can swiftly become nothing and conversely, that everything can be built again from nothing. Being shaped by the world without, we often need to travel within to make sense of things and access the history within us. Doing so activates our own responses as solutions and unfolds as history in the making. I have concluded that by utilising the conceptual and aesthetic methods of kantha described in this document, the contemporary artist can effectively make this journey between history and the present. A reinterpretation of kantha offers a holistic approach to the self and the world.

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