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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WHO MAN 2021-2023
The world we have known is being turned on its head. Nothing is as it was and nothing is, as it seems. At a time when all is in flux, Who Man? , once complete will be a series of sculptures and large mix media works on paper that are observations of the toll this time is taking on our men folk.
Men have inherited ancestral values of their forefathers and carry burdens of familial responsibility as breadwinners. Older men, faced with the world unravelling, long for days of past with a deep sense of nostalgia. Young men and boys teeter like young colts unsteady as the ground beneath them threatens their balance. Most men instinctively hide the constant the worry and anxiety that silently besets them threatening their life’s will.
Observations on male nostalgia and mental health is a subject matter close to my heart as, mother to two young boys, I live surrounded by men at home and the men at the brickyard that supports my creative practice. This work is a woman’s heart felt rendition of unspoken stories that are so familiar to us all.
