By Iminza Keboge
Published October 11, 2019
A British Indian Contemporary artist who practises even as she manages an online representing other artists returns to the Affordable Art Fair, for the 20th year, October 16 – 20, 2019.
Natasha Kumar, who has been exhibiting at the Affordable Art Fair for 20 years since it first swang its doors to the public in 1999, is exclusively releasing another new Indian Woman collection titled Three Sisters and will herself be working on Arthouse Gallery 16 throughout the fair sharing her stories.
Would you like to hear more about this weeklong show?
Three Sisters by Natasha Kumar is the latest collection to be released only at the Affordable Art Fair.
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If you are like me, your attention is likely to be captured and retained by the introduction that also serves as the caption for Kumar’s Three Sisters:
I met the gorgeously colourful women of Three Sisters in the shade of a banyan tree, where I was all but expiring from the Rajasthani heat.
They were carrying firewood. The banyan was their usual resting place en route to the potter’s village, not far from Bundi. It took two women to lift a basket back onto their heads, but they did it elegantly and efficiently, then headed off giggling.
When I looked over my sketches afterwards, it struck me how timeless that moment in the shade seemed. Women gathering wood to cook with, or to fire their iconic matka terracotta pots. It could have been a glimpse of Indian village life a thousand years ago, or yesterday. But would my three sisters still be doing it tomorrow, or in ten years, given the pressure of change?
To Gandhi, village life was a precious inheritance. Just as important were its animals and forests. If the village perishes, India will perish, he thought. India will be no more India. ‘Be Indian. Buy Indian’ was his mantra to ensure village life’s economic survival, adopted by the local cooking oil brand. But for me, the guardians of village life and the soul of India, are the women I encountered under the banyan: my three sisters.
Natasha Kumar’s work is about observations on the cultural roles available to women in India, and their individual and collective journey to empowerment.
She is well-known for her vivid images of contemporary India. From village scene to palace views, her work captures the art of every day, observing India as she is lived, whether in sunlight through a diaphanous sari or the steady homeward progress of a woman and her cow.
Here, hand drawn screen prints and etchings in Natasha’s signature bold, compelling colours, revel in the fall and fold of fabric that make India so alluring to our eyes. The works possess too that sense of place she loves to conjure– sometimes through detail, sometimes only by suggestion, by which she spirits us to locations that inspire her.
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Sangita Myska, a BBC broadcaster and journalist, another second generation Indian, describes the impulse behind them: ‘Fascinated by the country left behind by our parents, we return again and again to seek a more rounded sense of ourselves… [Natasha Kumar] evokes with deep love what is embedded in our souls.’
But the key works of this collection take the viewer further and deeper into a personal artistic exploration of Kumar’s heritage. It isn’t untrue to say that every painter paints themselves. The women of this exhibition–veiled, glimpsed, elusive–make us ask Natasha Kumar’s great question for her: what can she know of their lives, that might have been hers?
The Indian Woman collection of hand drawn silk-screen prints are observations on the cultural roles available to women in India, and their individual and collective journey to empowerment.
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In Diya, a hand drawn screenprint on paper with silver leaf , Indian woman carries a tray of votive oil lamps or diya, splendid in her hot-pink sari. At Diwali, the festival of light, it is traditionally her role to lay them at the entrance to the home, and welcome Lakshmi within. The goddess of wealth will not enter a house that is dark, so the cotton wick of the little ghee lamps must be lit before nightfall. But she has another role here: diya are lit at Diwali to banish the shadows of ignorance, making her a standard-bearer of knowledge, lighting the path for Indian women to fulfillment and prosperity.
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n Cosmic Change, a hand drawn screenprint on paper with 22 carat gold leaf, Indian Woman is trying to find her place in the modern world set against a background of an Islamic, geometric pattern where spiritual tradition and the fast paced movement forward through the circular cosmic order are in constant flux.
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Is the geometric design a deconstruction of the traditional social framework and Indian Woman is walking into a newly self defined image–a modern woman , educated and equal in her role to men–or is the incomplete geometric design a negative deconstruction, a symbol of Indian woman failing to assert herself and struggling to complete?
