Keen eye, keener strokes

Amarjot Kaur

Unlike most artists, Aditi Ganeev Sangwan, who is currently serving as a professor in Department of Graphic Arts at Santiniketan, gets different mediums to share the same space. Having studied at the Government College of Art, Sector 10, Aditi creates a dialogue between oil on canvas, etching, and she also takes to mix media, where she uses different fabrics using Kantha embroidery and running stitch.

We first try and understand her fixation with oil, especially when most acrylic is perceived as a more suitable substitute, considering that it dries faster than oil and is easier to maintain. “I sort of like the layers that can be created with oil and even though I have worked with water colours and poster colours; Oil is a more expressive medium,” she shares.

In her paintings, which are inspired by common objects, like red chillies, Aditi uses disarranged puzzles in windows that are a colourful representation of her personal experiences. “One of the paintings, I started when I was pregnant, and finished it later. The human form that you see in the painting came later when my son was born,” she shares. With as many as 60 works on display, Aditi exhibits artworks with etching as medium, on which she writes the gibberish that her son would say as a toddler and weaves those sounds in a poem. “It’s rather exciting to listen to a child as they mumble, as if it were a language. And, to me, that was really exciting, so I used words and sounds that my son would speak and make poems out of them,” she says.

Besides, Aditi also displays her art notebook, which is made on garware paper, and she uses threads to stitch small-size artworks on the paper. “I wanted two different mediums to share the same space, like paper and thread. So I have used very little, in fact, no glue to make this notebook. Also, some of the artwork here is on the prints that I got made on a printing press paper a long time ago,” she adds.

Like the art in her notebook, Aditi uses textiles and stitches pieces of different fabrics together to create an interaction between different art forms like embroideries, cut-work and painting. For this, she uses unprimed canvas cloth.

(On till October 28 at Department of Art History and Visual Arts, PU)

amarjot@tribunemail.com