Meera Menezes on Jayashree Chakravarty
In a scene from Earth as Haven: Beneath the Cover of Love, the documentary movie that accompanied Jayashree Chakravarty’s 2017 set up on the Musée Guimet in Paris, the artist goes foraging. We have now come to affiliate this follow with celeb cooks comparable to Virgilio Martinez and Alex Atala quite than with artists. However Chakravarty doesn’t scout for edible indigenous substances. As an alternative, she picks up fallen flowers, vines, and contemporary and dried leaves and incorporates these supplies into paper scrolls again in her studio.
Such natural materials is abundantly evident in Chakravarty’s newest works, a variety of which had been on view in “Feeling the Pulse” at Akar Prakar. Created over the course of the pandemic, these giant canvases featured assiduously built-up surfaces composed of writhing roots, an assortment of seeds, needlelike dried grasses, bits of string, tea stains, and sheets of translucent paper, all held along with a particular white glue. Highly effective expressionistic strains created darkish webs in Increasing, 2019–21, whereas a flurry of small white strokes of paint generated surf-like crests of pigment on the corners of Withstanding, 2021. Recognizable motifs from the pure world peeked out from dense mazes of strains—as an illustration, a yellow hen enshrined in Gold Finch, 2021, or the wiry crops that might be discerned in Connecting, 2020–21. Two years of self-isolation and intense introspection led Chakravarty to consider that her work lacked the vibratory sensation that she skilled whereas communing with the wildlife round her. To impart that sense of vibration, she felt it was crucial to interrupt the dominance of her strains, which she has finished by partially burying them beneath a sprinkling of crushed eggshells.
Lots of the methods that Chakravarty employs, comparable to tearing, reducing, and marking, in addition to her use of salvaged pure supplies to style surfaces, recall the time she spent as an artist-in-residence in Aix-en-Provence, France, between 1993 and 1995. There, she got here beneath the affect of Helps/Surfaces, a radical portray motion that took off in France after the occasions of Might 1968. Its protagonists sought to deconstruct the processes and really construction of portray, isolating its constituent components, comparable to canvas and body. Particularly taken by the work of Claude Viallat, Chakravarty established a dialogue with another members of the group.
The artist’s shut connection to nature has its roots in her childhood, which she spent in Tripura, a state in northeast India. She would accompany her father, a health care provider, into the jungle, keenly observing its lush vegetation. Later, she studied artwork at Visva-Bharati College in Santiniketan, West Bengal, delighting within the surrounding paddy fields and pastoral panorama. Over the a long time she witnessed the regular lack of biodiversity in Kolkata, town the place she at present lives and works. Concrete jungles have changed marshlands, and rampant urbanization has even led to the transformation of a salt lake into “Salt Lake Metropolis,” with its high-rise buildings. This ecological degradation and the lack of habitat for a lot of species proceed to preoccupy her. The bodily incorporation of parts from the plant and animal kingdoms into her work alerts Chakravarty’s need to protect a world that’s disappearing too quick. However her use of supplies comparable to gauze additionally hints at processes of restore and care, an try, maybe, at nursing again a despoiled panorama and planting seeds of recent life inside it.
— Meera Menezes
