Lavanya Mani
Lavanya Mani |
Lavanya Mani is one of the new age women artists in India, who skillfully negotiates the postmodern dilemmas in her works. Addressing a much debated colonial history from an elevated field of multi-cultural give and takes, Lavanya Mani finds her language from history book illustrations and pictorial renditions of the moral stories. Further, she finds her point of departure from the taxonomical detailing of flora and fauna to which she makes further samplings for incorporating them as the protagonists of her works.
The works of Lavanya Mani intend at a post colonial and multi-cultural critique, where the subjective presence of the artist remains minimized. Flora and fauna constitute the images of her works. Lavanya’s involvement with fabric industry not as a producer but as an aesthetic interventionist has yielded her rich fruits as she could find her surface of expression from the same field. She uses cotton fabric as her pictorial surface and natural dyes as her colour.
Though not a pronounced feminist in her works, Lavanya addresses the issues pertaining to feminism in a larger perspective. She brings in the unacknowledged craft and art practices of women like embroidery and stitching in her works. The painstakingly done embroideries enrich her pictorial surfaces and impart the effect of the rich carpets. Also she faces the colonial history that came to the third world through the cotton industry. She tries to evoke the sad plights of the fabric industry workers and their history of deprivation through parable like narratives.
An artist trained in Baroda Fine Arts Faculty, Lavanya has imbibed the legacy of narrative in her works. However, she restricts herself in fragmented narratives, which provide the viewers with indications and directions so that they could produce their own ways of seeing and reading a painting. Subdued colours that remind one of the fading sheets of shelved volumes of historical treatises impart a sense of nostalgia.
“Certain images are brought in very consciously. Some of them are erstwhile discarded images from my own paintings. They are embroidered, stitched and attached to the clothe surface and they play a pivotal role in generating the narratives. I actively question the patriarchal economy in which the women are subdued to the level of labourers. Stitching is a creative process and it has its own economics. I want to bring them in my works,” says Lavanya.
Lavanya’s works give a feeling of embroidered carpets from a distance. At times they look like colonial maps, which had been made for socio-cultural and political governance. By emulating such cartographic imageries in a very skilful way, Lavanya tries to map out an alternative history. The critique is not overt and she does not use the female ‘body’ in order to exemplify the history of colonial body politics.
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