Indian Women Printmakers

Issues of body and gender recur in my practice rather subconsciously. These underlying preoccupations get foregrounded in my work ‘We are the trees of one garden’ inspired by my visit to the village Piplantri in Rajasthan. The villagers of Piplantri plant 111 trees when a girl child is born. As I moved around the village, I found the women preparing the designated areas in the village for the next plantation. This experimental approach may also be to regenerate the original landscape around the area lost to excessive marble mining. I map this historical transformation of the village from an arid desert into an oasis of a variety of trees through the method of cyanotype printing. In printmaking one doesn’t know which areas might appear and disappear. This precarity invites the viewers to think deeply about erasures – of the gild child and the forest – alarming us to the regenerative uncertainty of our social and environmental futures.