COLLECTIONS
COLLECTIONS
INTALLATIONS
ABOUT
ABOUT
My life in London has roots that snake across continents and cultures. I am a mother-maker whose art in sculpture, collage, installation and poetry is a record of life as I see, feel, hear and hold. Through my making using ways of old and ordinary, I hope to remake a different telling of this story of life with no fixed beginning, middle or end. I work with clay, earth, ceramic, paper, wood, ink, paint and found print. In a world of the fast and furious, mine is a slow practice of listening, observing, depth, care, freedom and above all acceptance.
I meld form, pattern, and colour meshing materials drawing on my eastern ancestral knowledge of clay, cloth and colour. With a childhood deeply rooted in Kolkata’s Durga Thakur tradition, my association with clay is not with the ubiquitous pot
but that of the monumental idol of the Durga Protima. To me practice is devotion, sculpture, tradition, alive, story-carrying, godly-mortal, recording and replaying,
shape changing, bringer of communion, maker of community, and gloriously celebrates ours humanity.
Rooted in storytelling, I examine the human experience and contemporary life through intricate patterns and fluid forms. I merge age-old techniques with contemporary sensibilities influenced by Bengal’s artisanal traditions, creating richly
detailed surfaces.
A muddled life of moving lands many times, I am a reader and recorder of people. My visual chronicles of memory and belonging arise through experimenting with scale and materiality, I seek to transforms personal moments into universal reflections, weaving past and present, east with west to create a visual record of the evolving human condition.
Kumar Tuli, Kolkata © Devi Chakrabarti, India, 2018
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FREEDOMS FLIGHT 2020-2021
Freedom’s Flight, was magined and created in London where I live, emerged from my experience of the pandemic in a large metropolis. It was crystallised as the world as we know it came to a full stop in the spring of 2020 and took wing when India, my home country, was ravaged by a deadly second wave this year, sparing no family, including my own.
The series plays on the duality of the words, Freedom and Flight. Made of ceramic sculptures and large-scale mixed media works on paper, it explores the assault on sensibilities when personal spaces and freedoms are curtailed. All normality suspended, this time has paradoxi- cally given some the freedom to opt for a different way, the freedom to fly in the choices they take forward. Stories of both these conflicting emotions find expression in this body of work.
