The Voice of Fashion
Why this intersection of art, craft and textiles opens unheard dialogues between artists and artisans and how fashion can listen in
Intangibles, fine art, cultural motifs, mythological figures, memories, textiles, sound vibrations, organic jute, silk threads, natural dyes, artisanal minds, artistic freedom, motivation, language and trust. Imagine all or some of these elements dappling a once blank slate, or a pristine floor of a studio. The minds and hands at work then assimilate these materials and meaning to create artworks. They have seminal paintings to build upon as their canvas, to embroider and render them as textile art.
The process—deep and directional, revealing and unravelling in several ways—is not a therapy workshop. It is led nevertheless by interpretative dialogues, meditations on textiles, tweaking embroidery traditions, reimagining motifs drawn by painters to show the world (and to the self at work) what “artistic collaboration” means. How it can fuse diverse approaches while drawing from similar-familiar cultural notions to bring artists from different socio-economic backgrounds to create collectively. Where points of view, whether they are about the colour of thread chosen to depict the setting sun or the face of Goddess Durga, for instance, are not overwritten by existing socio-economic hierarchies. Instead, they are painstakingly democratised so that the artists find a personal semblance with the process while viewers discover authenticity of the process, a value which knows how to make its presence felt.
Mūḷ Māthī: From The Roots, a retrospective of well-known painters Manu and Madhvi Parekh reinterpreted in textiles by the Chanakya Craft Collective, curated by the Asia Society India Centre, currently on view in Mumbai, is one such endeavour.
Manu and Madhvi Parekh’s paintings, chosen from their extensive body of work of many decades, were embroidered over the pandemic years by artisans of the Mumbai-based Chanakya Craft Collective into textile-art pieces. These are large-scale (think huge, wall-sized) artworks, first displayed as tapestries at Dior’s Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2022 show last year. Now, 22 such pieces along with archival materials have been brought to Mumbai for this exhibition, also celebrating the work of 320 artisans from the Chanakya collective.
A Collective Endeavour
The Mūḷ Māthī opening was scheduled a day before Dior’s much-talked about Fall 2023 show held at the Gateway of India on March 30. It added to the meaning-making which Dior and Chanakya International underlined through the role karigars play in their inspirational as well as creative-commercial journeys.
The tapestry-artworks were rolled and brought to India by Asia Society India Centre and framed on site. With exhibition design by Reha Sodhi, the artworks are displayed in three areas—white, grey, and black. They suggest the many levels and layers of contextualising the original paintings. To do justice, as Karishma Swali says to “the freedom and feminine strength of Madhvi Parekh’s work and the resonating power of Manu Parekh’s artistic imagination”. Swali is the managing director of Chanakya International and the creative director of the Chanakya Craft Collective which has been working collaboratively with Dior for many years. It extends the brand’s creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s vision in many ways.
Mūḷ Māthī, which literally means “from the roots”, triggers contemplative curiosity. For this writer, it is about the backend processes—the nature of conversations, the skew of skill and talent if any between a crafts person and an allied hand at work, which languages were used for communication, how were learnings navigated between the Parekhs, among India’s most distinguished and admired artists and the craftspeople who work, train and reimagine at the Chanakya School of Craft. Who led the dialogue? Was there idea domination? With Swali as interpreter, was she the mentor or a disciple ceding the direction of the project to a master craftsperson?
“Very simply put, it is a collective dialogue,” says Swali adding that finding a crafts-embroidery resonance for a Manu Parekh painting that could translate the sound vibrations of a work called ‘Evening Chants’, for instance, is about “the amalgamation of a new language”. She says that Manu and Madhvi Parekh implicitly trusted the crafts collective with the translation of the works. “Trust” became a tool here. Swali also speaks of materials, natural dyes, organic jute which has been extensively used, silk threads, raw linen and cotton to play between the opacity and shine of motifs. While Madhvi Parekh’s interpretation of Durga (as Swali explains) was familiar for many artisans who culturally know Durga, the Goddess, the rendering of other ideas came from collective harmony. So besides straightforward ideas like boats, trees, the sun, there are abstract, expressionist ones by Manu Parekh where animal figures wear human expressions, where beast and man collide and coexist, where the mundane becomes existentially complex.
Art of the Matter
The exhibition note names contemporary variations of traditional hand-embroidery techniques such as “fumato, couching and zardozi, to capture the intense colors and bold brushstrokes of Manu Parekh.”
Mūḷ Māthī, which literally means “from the roots”, triggers contemplative curiosity.
“It was a brilliant rendering. I was particularly struck by the power of the scale, the dimensions of the artworks, the use of natural dyes and materials, the embroidery techniques employed, and the mounting of the exhibition that demarcated three segments into three halls,” says crafts and textiles expert Lavina Baldota of the Baldota Foundation, Hospet (Karnataka).
Others mention responsibility and sentiment. Like Radha Mahendru, Director Developments and Strategic Partnerships at the Asia Society India Centre, which curated the exhibition. “For me the penny dropped when I visited the Chanakya School of Craft where the artworks were made,” says Mahendru. She emphasises that this project may be about textile meets fashion but is distinct because it is not just an iteration of an artistic idea turned into a product, a wearable, or a costume. “It is like literature translated into another language in such a way that it elicits the same emotion despite its realisation in another language,” she adds. Calling it a dialogue in the making, Mahendru talks about how bringing the exhibition to India has opened the possibility of sparking new conversations around it.
Among things to marvel at is the mathematical, logistic and organisational heft at play given the size and value of these art pieces. Or, the fact, as Mahendru points out, that an army of people have been at work, that there is a reading room at the exhibition area as well as guided walks are offered in multiple languages.
Within the most important concerns, given Dior’s telling and retelling of its artisan-proud purpose wing in wing with Chanakya’s artisans, is the signature of the karigars. One wall at the exhibition names all 320 artisans, and a QR code at the opening too takes you to these details. Not every artwork is individually signed by a craftsperson though which would be logistically impractical as these are collective creations. Yet, perhaps that dialogue, if a master craftsperson or a leading artisan should get their name on a work signifying a group, is one that awaits resolution between artists, fashion designers and the usually anonymous artisans in the larger, art x crafts x textiles x fashion ecosystem.
Swali says when she asked one of her artisan colleagues at the Dior show how they felt while looking at the scaled-up toran at the Gateway of India, the person’s response was “Jai Hind”.
Mūḷ Māthī; From The Roots, will be on display at Snowball Studios Mumbai till April 22.
Banner: An artwork at display at Mūḷ Māthī: From The Roots, a retrospective of well-known painters Manu and Madhvi Parekh reinterpreted in textiles by the Chanakya Craft Collective, curated by the Asia Society India Centre, currently on view in Mumbai.
