Artist Bakula Nayak collects vintage ephemera and paints her imaginations on them
In her collection of over 3,000 papers, there are legal documents from pre-Independent India, music sheets dating to the 1920s, and old maps of India and the US, among others.
Bakula Nayak’s paintings are on everyday grocery bills, love letters, postcards and journals.
In a bill book that dates back to 1907, a man maintains a personal journal. With a note on the weather, he talks about the day’s activities, but doesn’t express his feelings. Artist Bakula Nayak found some pages of this diary in a quaint vintage store in Minneapolis, US, and decided to keep them. In it, she read a line: ‘Wife is here…fun evah since Tuesday’. “For such an impersonal journal, this sentence is particularly intimate as I saw a side of him that made him real,” says Nayak, who has painted a pair of lovelorn flamingos on the pages as an ode to their relationship. These paintings, with vintage ephemera and photographs, are a part of Nayak’s first solo exhibition, ‘Intimate Strangers’, organised by Artisera, an online marketplace for art and collectibles. In her previous show ‘Sangam (Unplugged)’, she responded to Sangam poetry through her paintings, while musician Sushma Somasekharan sang along.
There is something about a child’s well-worn alphabet block, a handwritten letter or a half-filled ink bottle with a torn label that calls out to Nayak, who has been collecting such abandoned papers since childhood. The artist worked at a fragrance house in New York for several years before moving back to her hometown, Bengaluru.
In her previous show ‘Sangam (Unplugged)’, she responded to Sangam poetry through her paintings, while musician Sushma Somasekharan sang along.In her collection of over 3,000 papers, there are legal documents from pre-Independent India, music sheets dating to the 1920s, and old maps of India and the US, among others. Her paintings are on everyday grocery bills, love letters, postcards and journals, which she has bought from vintage shops, flea markets, and garage sales from across the world. She first started painting, using ink and pen, on the letters her parents exchanged. A piece of paper that has not turned brittle after a century may live even longer, says the artist, but not all may withstand watercolour, so she uses a variant gouache.
Nayak paints chrysanthemums with a teapot-shaped house on the page of an old gardening journal, a child indulges in a melon in another, and also an underground tea party of rabbits. Her idea of home can be seen on a bunch of house tax papers and postcards, that she bought from a second-hand shop in Delhi, belonging to one Ahmed Husain, who lived near Jama Masjid around 1947.
“Bills, letters, legal papers help me rebuild fragments of people’s lives. An incurable romantic, I don’t want to know their reality even if someone were to tell me, I like my imagined one from the traces they have left behind.”
The exhibition at India International Centre Annexe, Lodhi Estate, closes today.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario