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Eye of a needle
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Artist Surekha's output in the last seven years has been prodigious. She clinically sums up what she has seen or heard, while her stitches encapsulate — in oblique ways — wars, weavers, wishes, worries. RAGHAV SHREYAS on a show held at Sakshi Art Gallery recently, which moves to Sweden in September 2003.
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Stitching stories ... examples of Surekha's work (above and below).
A creative individual tends to oscillate from the small group contact to the large group contact, balancing one with the other. For him, to be Indian is laudable but not at the expense of being a human being; conversely, to be a human being is laudable if by this he does not lose his intimacy with the immediate environment.
K.G. Subramanyan, 1987
IN the years 1996 and 1997, Surekha applied washes of watercolour and subtle running stitches on rice paper. The paper metamorphosed into textures of skin, and "body" was present in the abstract without a strong defining shape. At the end of a collection of works, Surekha's rice paper transformed itself into a set of blouses.
Surekha then worked on the blouse-theme for two more years. After that, she took to travelling. She began stitching stories together from various cultures, and her material gradually underwent a change.
Currently, she works with silk. In the gallery, a 100 metre silk cloth hangs like a curtain — translucent, light, and comforting to the sight. Suspended from the ceiling by four strings, the cloth looks like four separate pieces.
On the material, a stitch graphically runs in the shape of plant twigs, set in five parallel streams. At the end of every twig is a handcrafted poppy flower. On the floor, dozens of the same flowers surround the work, evoking an act of worship. Surekha has titled the work — "They grow everywhere".
After World War II, beginning in Flanders, endless blankets of poppies grew in several parts of Europe. They grew, so to speak, `out of flesh and blood". On November 11 every year, people all over Europe wear them on their lapels. "The British Legion gave me about 2,500 flowers," Surekha said "... They told me they felt guilty about the Indians who fought for the British during World War II, but got no epitaphs, or even graves." Apart from her stitched material, tiny, yellowish brown photographs fill a corner of the gallery. Most of them record a nude wearing plaits made by Surekha. The plaits are made using beads that look like jasmine flowers. The plait puns on the structure of the spinal chord, stretching snake-like on the back of the nude model. The beads are partially hidden by stitched silk in the shape of leaves. Among these pictures, a singular photograph violently pelts a different feel.
It is a photograph of a deep brown door. Large needles are pierced on it.
The door hides a sacred symbol at Phool Mahal in Rajasthan — the impression of a hand of a 10-year-old girl, who willingly committed sati as her fiancée passed on. The photograph is pregnant with suspense — the viewer cannot see the impression — the door blocks out a private truth. Instead, the needles on the photograph stand in for a hallowed brutality you may never encounter.
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In January 2003, "Sites of Recurrence" was the theme of a workshop at Dakshina Chitra in Chennai. The aim there for artists was to improvise with craftspeople from various locales. Time was a major constraint — about two weeks were all they had. Surekha encountered a dozen craftswomen. The women chatted incessantly while they stitched, and stitched incessantly while they chatted. A woman held forth about sex and tied a knot every second. "The decisions made in a tradition-oriented society are apt to be unconscious decisions" observed Charles and Ray Eames, after touring India for three months in 1958 — "in that each situation or action automatically calls for a specified reaction. Behaviour patterns are pre-programmed, pre-set." They inferred — "It is in this climate that handicrafts flourish. Changes take place by degrees — there are moments of violence but the security is in the status quo". Surekha collaborated with these women. She prepared a large cloth by setting quadral arrangements of four beads each, and constrained them by a running stitch. She left the middle of the cloth open for the women to work on. The women got down to work on it with large needles and red stitches. They were asked to leave the needles pierced after every stitch. The finished work looks like a work in progress - the frame breathes silence, and is contrasted by a chaotic but graphic patch in the middle that declares a violent presence.
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Surekha's output in the last seven years has been prodigious. Every time she found a story, oral, written (or hidden), her sartorial sensibilities were activated. Surekha is not, however, a storyteller. She clinically sums up what she has seen or heard, while her stitches encapsulate — in oblique ways — wars, weavers, wishes, worries.
In 1965, John Berger wrote, "A painter is free to paint anything he chooses". Three and a half decades have matured his statement. There are no common concerns peculiar to globalised societies, no grand organising principles, no shared cultural expressions. Artists today gather a million different stimuli and parade them. "True", said K. G. Subramanyan, "in an open society like that of today, a man's personal heritage is not as compact and uniform as in older societies". (1987) Typically today, an artist writes a proposal, travels abroad, executes the proposal, and returns to narrate a confessional. Even then, choosing or creating material to correlate chaotic sensations is crucial to creating works of significance.
Surekha sometimes, like most of us, is a foreigner to her own cultural past.
This alienation can help an artist — in freely moving across cultures, in modifying rules or playing out different ones, and, in creating speckles if not spectacles. Surekha has attempted to come to grips with this alienation through the eye of the needle. And we notice after all, in the end, her needles have seen much.
Raghav Shreyas is a writer, critic and photographer based in Bangalore.
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