JEHANGIR NICHOLSON ART FOUNDATION
Over the last three decades or more, Jayashree Chakravarty’s art practice has addressed the exigent situation of shrinking natural habitat and water bodies in ever-expanding Indian cities. Living by herself in a rapidly urbanizing suburb of Kolkata in Eastern India, she has been a witness to the rich marshlands of Salt Lake transform into ‘Salt Lake City’ a sprawling suburban development, exemplary of congestive urbanism and a growing hostility towards the ecology of life. Her work then extrapolates this loss, reacting and reflecting upon a fast disappearing natural world. Nature no longer is a force independent of human impact and control. Jayashree reminds us that the earth is continuously being pushed towards a precarious edge, where the threat of daily damage has taken on precipitous dimensions. Through poetic evocations, she weaves into her personal vision the need for environmental healing and resurrection.
Having grown up in Tripura, the artist frequently visited the lush northeast Indian jungles with her father who was a doctor and an avid naturalist. Jayashree vividly recalls her formative years, when she was exposed to the joys of wonderment at every little discovery in the world around her. She was made aware of cycles of bloom and decay, insects and birds building their homes sharing the same tree and the symbiotic relation of things around her.
Nature for her ceases to be a ‘view of the landscape’ frozen in time but has always meant the extended holistic environment that can neither be captured nor comprehended from a single vantage point. Her soaring paper installations hence opt for a mobile vision that takes the viewer’s gaze along to glide over the surface of her unframed scrolls as well as penetrate the layers underneath.
Working with organic material – medicinal seeds, roots, dry leaves, sap, dry flowers, nature is both the subject and substance of her art. It is both context and content for her ruminations on inhabiting and preserving the earth.
Roobina Karode
Guest curator
Jayashree Chakravarty was born in Khoai, Tripura in 1956. She completed her BFA at Visva Bharati, surrounded by the sprawling nature of Santiniketan. She then earned her MFA in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, where she was exposed to the strikingly different urban environment. From 1993 to 1995, Chakravarty was an artist in residence at Aix-en-Provence, where she was influenced by the French movement, ‘Supports/Surfaces,’ and was especially inspired by Claude Viallat.
Her formative years were spent in Calcutta, in proximity of hills and forests, and a variety of flora and fauna. The township soon became a concrete jungle, with few traces of the natural past left behind. This change influenced her paintings, where she melded the old and new cityscapes together with skilled expertise. An occasional bird, a broken window, or a brick wall emerge from the mossy hue and mouldy texture of some of her works.
Developing her own artistic techniques using organic material and varied kinds of papers, Chakravarty’s paper scrolls installations remain unique in their conception and execution. Her works are autobiographical and dream-like in nature; the ink on paper sketches are exercises in transition and transform personal experience into mystical truth. She experiments with an exciting variety of media like rice paper, tissue, and cellophane. She also superimposes forms, similar to the sketches that cave painters worked on before they mapped them on the walls of caves. Because of her fluid and transparent images, Chakravarty’s imagery reflects the present mood of the world, which is fluid in itself. At a mere conventional and figurative level, her works reflect the unity of man with nature. Motifs such as dogs, waves, and serried crescent shapes recur in her works.
She received the Gujarat Lalit Kala Akademi Award and the Second Bharat Bhavan Biennale Award in 1988. She was also honoured with the Bombay Art Society Award in 1980 and the Honourable Mention Award from the Asian Art Biennial, Dhaka in 1997, among others. Chakravarty lives and works in Calcutta.
