Trees stretching up their branches to reach the skies, trees that frame a burst of flowers, trees that dance with the moon in the night and canopies that are wise in their silence - all of them exquisite pieces of art done with old cloth, tailor discards and even waste paper. The ongoing art exhibition by Medha Bhat at the Alliance Francaise is aptly named Sacred Grove - Trees of Vrindavan.And Medha had an amazing story to tell on how she fell in love with these trees made of cloth. The tale went back many a year, when she was a student at the National Institute of Design and had to do a research project in Kutch, on Pakistan border, the home of applique work in India. ‘’I had to travel for hours together and there was not a single tree on the way. It was hot and I was terribly thirsty by the time I reached a little village where huts were made of thatched roofs,’’ she recalled.Medha ran into one of these huts and there on the wall was this huge applique tree. She stopped in awe, her thirst quenched by just the sight of it. Every single house had such pieces of exquisite art. ‘’Most of these houses had no wardrobes or storage spaces. They would stack their quilts, woollens and other clothes and cover it with such a wall hanging of applique tree,’’ she said.The Garden of Rann, which was how Medha named her project, referring to the houses with trees and flowers in them in the Rann of Kutch area, taught her a lot about living with limited resources. ‘’When I would tear out a paper to write down something, they would stop me and hand out the inside of a beedi-cover. The villagers recycle everything and maybe why applique originated there,’’ said Medha, who imparted her knowledge of recycling waste to the Zero Waste Centre at Kovalam for many years, until she had a baby boy.If applique is the major technique used, Medha has added emphasis to the works with kantha stitch. ‘’Once I applique the work on to the background, I use the running stitch. It is a very versatile stitch and something I love,’’ said Medha, a native of Bhavnagar in Gujarat and who has made the city her home for more than five years. Sure enough, you see the running stitches forming the veins of a leaf in one creation, stem in the next, root in yet another and even the yellow rays of a blazing sun.Medha has also celebrated the reverse applique technique too, so typical of Gujarat. ‘’In the villages of Gujarat, little girls learn embroidery from the age of five or six. All their life, they do embroidery work. But the smoke from the firewood, which they use for cooking, slowly affects the eye and when they grow older, they turn to applique work,’’ said Medha.In a work titled ‘Vasant’, you see flowers in different shapes and sizes and colours, all done in reverse applique. ‘’The reverse applique technique is very similar to the paper art, where we fold paper and cut it in different shapes to get beautiful designs. It requires a lot of patience and an initial sketch too,’’ said Medha. Another classic piece is the one inspired by Ashok Banker’s series on Ramayana. A closer look at the depiction of a forest would reveal that there’s a lot more happening there than just the silence of the falling leaves. Suddenly you realise the blue patch is Ram, the pink one Laxman, both wearing tie and dye dhothis in orange and yellow and holding bows of black-dotted beige cloth. You can even hear the little birds all over the forest trying to show Ram the way where Ravan had taken Sita; it’s all so rich and full of sound and life.There in the middle of the hall is this installation of a white canopy lighted from within, with little flowers spread on the ground and a cute little lamp beneath it. ‘‘This is the tree that was Krishna’s favourite. I thought this would bring in an unseen presence of Krishna,’’ explained Medha. In many of the creations, the blue flowers, often in the centre, represented Krishna.Trees, which have the most intimate contact with nature, come not in two and three dimensions in Medha’s works, but as she says in ‘two-and-a-half dimension’ as well. So instead of all the patient cutting and pasting of waste cloth, you see cloth with organic prints folded up in such a way to give a feel of an overall canopy.It’s all trees and trees in there, and the woods, and the birds. And if to Tagore, trees are earth’s endless efforts to speak to the listening heaven, to Medha these trees are an effort to communicate the importance of recycling in today’s world.
Comments
0 comment