Trucking to Rajasthan

On our long drive to Jaipur a couple of weeks ago, we saw trucks decorated with colored tinsel, artificial flowers and stenciled, taped and painted decorations. I kept trying to photograph the truck fronts, their most decorated part, from the car, but was unable to snap a full frontal view of a prime specimen. 

Textile Research

We took the metro (women only in the first car) to see Threads of Change, Textile Cultures of North East India at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. The show featured woven fabrics from remote tribal areas. The instinct to make something beautiful seems universal. Why else go to the trouble of dyeing cotton and silk and weaving intricate and sophisticated patterns when simply functional cloth would suffice?

Then on to a great lunch at the Craft Museum. The Museum’s textile collection is fabulous, but sadly is terribly lit, and poorly labelled and displayed. I especially liked the diamond-gridded embroidered Punjabi Phulkari patterns, many in glorious marigold hues, but photography wasn’t allowed…. Here’s a sample in white from Sanskriti’s Textile Museum along with a few other fabric excerpts.

Starting with What's at Hand

I am here at Sanskriti with artists Adria Arch from Boston and Hartash Dale from London.  We have started to explore the grounds by making rubbings of some ceramic tiles and an unusual asymmetrical sewer grate. 

    

    

The shapes from the sewer grate suggest tri-cornered teeth, dog biscuits or cartoon trilobites.

The wonderful shadow puppets on display in the Sanskriti gallery are mostly from Andrah Pradesh. They are made from painted leather and jointed at head, limbs, wrist, elbow, shoulder, ankle, knee and hip for ease of animated action.

 

                                   

                                                                                            

Arrival at Sanskriti

I finally have (slow) internet access -- after 9 days in Delhi! So I will backtrack to 7th of January…. 

Founders’ Day festivities had taken place earlier in the week I arrived at the Sanskriti Foundation to begin my residency -- Sanskriti is 35 years old. Some of the decorations – flowers and rangoli patterns painted on the ground -- remained. Red roses floated in pools of water. Concentric curves of neatly-laid yellow marigolds wreathed the base of a 200 year-old banyan tree. The grounds of Sanskriti Kendra are a serene oasis in the chaos and noise of Delhi traffic and street life.