PROJECT OVERVIEW:
Created at the crossroads of 'Art' and 'Design', this project was about experiencing the 'vernacular'. In doing so, I made a deeper exploration of the ‘local’. Through the lens of everyday rituals, I chose to determine how differently my twin sister and I interact with our locales (Delhi and Bangalore respectively). The collaborative playful dialogue that was created about our distinctive everyday rituals, through a series of visual representations, facilitated my larger inquiry about the ways in which the immediate environment of an individual informs changes in her/him.
The following print experiment was carried out using sounds of the streets as a trigger and mono-printing as the medium. The idea behind working with sounds was that a closer observation of the sound could hint at various activities of the space it was recorded in, thus attributing to certain local elements. An experimentation of magnifying and zooming in to attend to the details; the sounds that were recorded ranged from daily walk to college, to auto and bus conversations, to a sound of the street market, to the festive sounds of the 'Dussehra' festival that the community was prepping for. Using these soundscapes, narratives were created that spoke about the sound and the changed preferences and attitudes of the twins. While unfolding the sound, I decided to work with mono-printing because of its form and unique experience. No print comes out identical reflecting the fact that no experience, even of the same sound, can ever be the same for different individuals.
The narratives were stitched on the prints through embroidery embellishments. This is simply done because of the fact that even the most mundane experiences have these tiny moments of joy that may not be acknowledged because they are a part of the routine. Following is a series of eight single prints that situates art in the mundane.
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The Ordinary Life of a Twin
[The Print Experiment Series]
[The Print Experiment Series]
There is poetry in your everyday life; in the conversations, the food we eat, the fragrances that surround us. Our experiences of the routine define us and make us who we are. This prose is about a pair of identical twins. About their ordinary experiences and the everyday rituals that makes them two distinctive individuals. It is about these elements of the ‘local’ they interact with. And about their habits and preferences that differed in response to their different locales.
This visual experimentation of experiences is in itself a slice of life. Look carefully for it will unpack wonder in the mundane, to tell you about the local radio, the street, and the native lingo. The ordinary will narrate a story, a story about ‘one’ and ‘the other’. So take a step closer, look at the finer threads of the ‘local’ that is beautifully woven into layers, making it anything but ordinary.
An early bird or a night owl?
The serene night or the bright daylight?
One wakes up early to work,
The other prefers an hour later at night.
With sweet freshness, there was polluted smoke.
Every morning her roads blared with cars and cows,
She often skipped the walk to prevent a choke.
A regular at the college canteen,
Cheese usually followed the order.
Dosa for one, Paratha for the other!
The street strummed with routine chores,
The sound of the radio or a T.V. show,
One plugged in her earphones,
The other danced to the Punjabi radio!
As footsteps plodded a marshy path,
Due to the rain that caused plip-plip-plop;
One commended her choice of shoes,
While the other walked in her flip flops, flip-flop!
In the new cities,
Our responses took on a different spree
From ‘Yeah’, To ‘Haanji’
To the song the pitter-patter narrated.
One danced with glee, the other wasn’t interested,
For her love for the rain had faded.
A dissimilarity the native languages spun,
The unfamiliar Kannada chitter chatter baffled one,
While the other became the gregarious chatty one!
