Threading nature

Lace plant

This Sunday, if we dump by a Special Project Space in Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, you’ll come face to face with an frail 18-feet coral, done of edging and thread, dangling from a ceiling. This square will strive for your courtesy with frail skeletons of algae, seaweed, jellyfish, pulpy flowers, leaves and seeds – all appearing as if they are levitating, unblushing by gravity, as they boyant in potion casks and bottles. These botanical and nautical ‘specimens’, invented and reconfigured from thread and wire, are a handiwork of Delhi-born artist Sumakshi Singh, who is in a city with her initial solo, Leaving The Terrestrial: Its Own Kind Of Archive.

The walk-through installation, In The Garden

“It’s set adult as a mock-natural story museum-style exhibit. The repository of armatures references memory, nature, scholarship and fantasy, as lace-like fragments that seem to be festooned on air. “It isn’t mostly that artists get to exam their use with a non ‘art world’ crowd. So, we am looking brazen to see a reactions of all sorts of people, including those who are on their approach to a zoo,” shares Singh, who has formerly showcased her works during Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Art, France, and MAXXI Museum, Rome.

These embody an designation where viewers can travel into an illustrated publishing book with lopsided drawings, another where animated, embellished characters from famous frescoes of a universe travel over a vaulted ceiling, and an muster where Singh has confirmed microcosmic worlds in a cracks of a walls.

Details from designation Leaving The Terrestrial: Its Own Kind Of Archive

Piecing a past
Singh’s assignation with thread and handle began a year-and-half ago, when she started embroidering a letters her mom had penned for her. It was a approach to reconnect with her after her death. “She was an implausible gardener; during times, she would send pulpy flowers in her letters to me. we also started embroidering these flowers. Then, it became pure that a fabric on that this was festooned was too present. The difference and plant forms indispensable to float, giveaway from a fabric and so, we detected a technique of stealing a fabric, so that a thread can exist as a levitating sketch with no belligerent [no paper, no fabric], permeated with space as if festooned on air… like a inlet of memory. So, in a way, it is an repository of invented memory, of imagination and of play,” she explains.

Using thread and handle as a media was also connected to her mother. “She was an embroiderer. Since a whole array came from a enterprise to bond with her, it seemed natural. It’s also engaging how a thread ties itself to a belligerent — a fabric. Then, we mislay a intent that provides it a stability, nonetheless it stands.”

Sumakshi Singh. Pic courtesy/Sunder Ramu 

Tread into a garden
The specimens lead visitors to a second installation, In The Garden, where they are invited to travel by luminous, hand-drawn and festooned stop-motion animations projected on pure scrolls of unresolved fabric and dusty flowers, dangling from a ceiling. She elaborates, “This is a labour-intensive though fun routine where we paint or amplify a picture of a plant and each time we pull a line or supplement a stitch, we take a print of it from a same angle. When all these photos are run in a fast sequence, a plant appears to grow.”

From: May 7 to Jun 6, 10 am to 5.30 pm (Wednesdays closed)
At: Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, Rani Baug, BA Road, Byculla (E). 
Call: 23731234

Related Posts

• History on song: Remembering Live Aid 1985 by books and online resources
• Do it a right way: Key points to remember when going for a trek
• This height offers egg and bacon-tasting options but going non-vegetarian