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Mamta's Mantle: Armored With Love
Mamta's Mantle: Armored With Love
Medium - Acrylic, fabric, gold thread, embroidery, pearls, and found objects on heat-distressed industrial house wrap.
Dimensions - 13 FT x 6 FT
Description of Artwork:
Mamta" is a Hindi word for the deep, instinctive tenderness of maternal love.
A bull elephant eventually leaves the matriarchal herd that raised him. He grows into one of the largest animals in the landscape, while the maternal world that first sheltered him recedes.
Mamta's Mantle imagines that love returning to him as a second skin. Made for a life-size tusker, it is armor that shows what has happened to it. Four seasons move across its surface in changing colors and textures, each leaving something behind before giving way to the next.
The seasons are growing harder to predict. Elephants must find their way through that changing world, as must the rest of us who share it. By adding elements from my own clothing that have been part of my ‘second skin’ over the years, I have tried to convey a promise of kinship and solidarity…a recognition that the threats we face are the same, and that if we overcome them, it must be together.
Artist Statement
Artist Statement
Mamta's Mantle began with a simple impulse: to extend the maternal love I feel for my own human family toward a being of another species, and to imagine the deepest, most protective form of love as something an elephant could wear.
My work in skin studies treats skin as a membrane between self and world: it absorbs pressure, carries history, and keeps most of it hidden. It is where we meet the weather and where the world leaves its marks.
The clothing in this mantle is my own, garments that once lay against my skin. Cutting them apart was a kind of letting go. Stitching them onto a work of this scale turned them into an offering.
I chose house wrap because it is made to be unseen, noticed only when it fails. Laying it over an elephant asks who we build shelter for, and who we build around. I scorched it, cut into it, layered it, and bound it back together, so the armor carries evidence of vulnerability rather than concealing it.
I made this for a bull because he is the one we assume needs nothing. For me, his immense body and his vulnerability are not contradictions. They are what make him familiar. Size does not make us invulnerable. Strength does not spare us from loss.
The mantle cannot protect any real elephant. It is a gesture, a human offering of kinship across species, made in the hope that we can learn to share space as gently as we are able.
Pictures: Work In Progress
Pictures: Work In Progress
Pictures: Draped on Elephant
Pictures: Draped on Elephant
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