Pune-based visual artist Sujata Dharap’s recent exhibition Outer Edge at Mumbai’s Jehangir Art Gallery was an extraordinarily colourful work of acrylic on wood. Dharap, born and raised in Mumbai, is a recipient of a National Award of the All India Arts and Crafts Society, among others. She says that structure and architecture always fascinated her, and the latest exhibition is one year’s worth of labour.
During her travels, from wood shops in Indonesia’s Bali, Dharap picked up planks of distressed wood because she loved the way they looked. There, she also designed 22 frames in the dimensions she wanted. “Nothing has changed in the frames. In just one or two, I made subtler changes by toning them down, but 90 per cent of the frames are as it is.”
The frames became the starting point of her story and her work is all about writing a story in reverse chronology. She says that the last thing an artist does is go to the frame-maker. However, in her case, she started from there. “The frames made me do what I did. They spoke to me and I fulfilled it, within that space” she says. The frame determined the palette too. There are some single colour works and there are ones that have multiple colours too. The paintings have straightforward, uncomplicated names such as Edge Green, Edge Egg White and Edge Brown, to name a few, but they do have a deeper meaning. Later, of course, the frames became part of the painting and Dharap has done a marvellous job at integrating both.
Dharap has created these paintings on marine ply and also chipped layers of wood, bringing wooden sensitivity into the entire space. “I get tonnes of different kinds of wood, and it gives me the natural feel, gelling beautifully with the old wood of the frame,” she says. For Dharap, it is also about connecting the outer and the inner, the visual world that is outside and the other world that is within. Her paintings are all about the connection between these two worlds.
Her paintings are also a lot about straight lines, curves, openings in architecture, doors and windows. “It is about the city,” says Dharap, who is fascinated by the old world and natural materials. Besides, she also worked on Standing Edges, where a painting doesn’t sit on walls, but is projected onto the centre of any space. There are right-angled old teak doors, left as it is with just a gentle polish, which are painted differently in and out. What this does is open up a world of multiple possibilities. It can be made into a corner, a cube by turning it around, or a partition when flattened. As they say, imagination is (indeed) the highest kite one can fly.
