For a long time now, nature has been the subject as well as the substance of Jayashree Chakravarty’s art. Her works draw sustenance from the organic materials she puts to use, collecting dry leaves and dry flowers, twigs and delicate branches, roots and medicinal seeds, and now, crushed eggshells as well, weaving and mending, as if the ruptured fabric of life. An accomplished painter, her densely composed canvases in the past decades, exploded with excessive imagery both gestural and visceral, drawing the viewers in the vortex of unsettling inchoate landscapes, colliding aerial and frontal views, subverting any static vantage point. Here, the painted lines along with dry twigs, crushed shells and tiny stuffed rags, stir up an intricate visuality, drawing our attention to an assembly of nesting and flowing lines, rapid and languid, all threading a maze, a camouflage and the raw fecundity of nature.
Jayashree has also created monumental cocoon-like structures to make us step into an insect’s world or the alien sphere where humans are the least dominant species. Through her art, she envisions and urges for a less divisive place on earth that is fertile with possibilities of co-habitation and co-existence.
Roobina Karode
Director and Chief Curator,
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India
Text and photos: Akar Pakar, New Delhi
