Ode to homeland’s memories

Through her solo exhibition, which began on October 29 and will be on display to November 5, Revati Sharma Singh will give an ode to her homeland’s memories of collecting grains and harvest.

The solo show ‘Colour, Stone, Chintz , Grains and Statue’, presented by Gallery Art & Soul, will be exhibited at Centre for Contemporary Art, CCA- Bikaner House, New Delhi.

Revati is an interdisciplinary artist, working between London and India for the last 23 years and her quest has always been about the great divide between hunger and abundance around the world.

The Himachal-born, London-based artist will transform her abstract canvases of vivid hues where grains are threaded, cast in metal, and embroidered around like Zari-work across terraced rice fields, on gunny bags and delicate porcelain plates. They become seeds that were cast in precious metals, to be woven. Manifesting her five-decade-long journey she casts a grain in steel making it monumental.

At her London studio, Revati has been crafting abstracts that mimic the flourish of flowers, at times resembling dry marigolds, expressing a vibrant palette. Until she visits her mother’s home in the hills, that drastically transformed her artistic narrative. The loss of seeds and indigenous agricultural practices became her muse. Her light sky blue backgrounds intersect with the histories of Pahari painting, Himachal, and Chintz. The canvases and drawing papers began to populate with seeds – cast in precious metals and woven, and with monumental grains – cast in steel, forging a poignant connection to her roots. Echoing the connection to her mother’s garden, a diaspora in a land that colonized her, and most importantly, her mental being, this journey is a re-appropriation of the chintz, a decolonial repair, bringing back a visual and colored hue to where it truly belongs.

In her solo showcase, Revati Sharma Singh reclaim these emotions for objects that hold their culture through their practices as artists. Experience how materiality finds new meaning in Gallery Art & Soul’s newest dual show Colour, Stone, Grain, Chintz, and Statue.

Revati is a Himachal-born artist with the Delhi College of Arts as her alma mater. Presently based in London, her paintings visualise instances and memories we hold with age. Like vivid visuals of our parents’ homes, Revati finds her instances in a tea estate nestled in the Himalayan hills of Himachal where her mother, a cancer survivor, grows vegetables and fruits refusing to leave for the urban clamour with better medical facilities and in her teenage children that bring home visuals of popular culture through games, fashion, skateboards, and anime; all of it happening in a diasporic environment where India is omnipresent through immigration and the rise of the new prime minister but the identity still holds a long legacy of immigration.