Lessons in Womanhood
Lina Vincent Sunish
Six artists share a single work each, and talk about how they use their art as women, to express themselves and also to negotiate the complexities that are patterned around gender discourse. Readers are invited to enter into the simple experience of how anartist thinks through the idea of being a woman, and whether or not it is of significance in artistic creation. The purpose of this compilation is to produce a broad dialogue about womanhood in its physicality andphilosophy, bringing into purview the politics of gender, women’s freedoms and limitations in society, motherhood and its challenges, and women being ultimately, close to nature acting as nurturers of the environment.
Siri Devi Khandavilli is a multidisciplinary artist working between Bangalore, India and USA. Her work translates and reinterprets existing cultural icons and often explores notions of contemporary womanhood through engagements with mythologizing the body and the self.
Rani Jha is an artist based in Madhubani, Bihar, where she practices and teaches Mithila painting and uses it as a tool of personal articulation and social activism. Her art reflects a language of symbolism and metaphor providing a window into the challenges of women’s empowerment.
Priti Vadakkath’s paintings embody the lives of people around her, particularly children and their perspectives. Living and working in Kochi, Kerala she has built up a significant repertoire with watercolours.
SonalVarshneya is a printmaker with an active studio practice in Lucknow, UP. She has been working with the recurring theme of feminism over the years and also elaborates this through distinctive studies of the self.
Moutushi Chakraborty is a Kolkata based painter and printmaker who has been exploring personal, cultural and historical contexts of femininity through her arts practice.
Meenakshi belongs to the Lambani itinerant tribe from Karnataka in South India, and constantly references her personal history and community through her embroidery based explorations.
PRITI VADAKKATH
“My work is as much informed by my cultural background – having been brought up in a large, catholic joint family, as it is with my daily interactions with and observations of my son who has autism, and his predicaments, successes and failures in coping with the same world that he and I inhabit.
For me, womens’ concerns are not any different from the concerns of humanity as a whole. The articulation by women in art or in any creative space is not about putting forth ‘their point of view’, but actually correcting the skewed perspectives that we inherited from the masculine chronicling of history; She makes up for all the shortfalls in the narrative.
