portraits (CJ)

I started this project with the idea of completing a series of portraits in silhouette of various characters in the Pol, on chai (tea) cups.  Somehow that idea changed, morphed, evolved into papercuts, transfers, water prints, and landed at a tea set decorated with peacocks.
A national emblem (in India) the peacock is a symbol of beauty, the eternal soul, a perfect love, all things wonderful.  Some believe that man was created from the eyes of peacock feathers, others have a different story, but each connects somehow to the beauty of the birds...  An apt motif then, for creating beauty from the everyday...  Connecting serendipitously again to Amanda's list of coincidences, the song that Palak sings in Amanda's film calls for a beautiful bird to fly to heaven and ask the goddess to come down and dance garba - what a beautiful image - and one I hope to create by making the words of this song (in gujarati) fly up to heaven, via the teapot surface in gold and black.

Alongside this I am producing a series of portraits of people from the pol photographed during the Entry filming day, the door provides a continuity for the differing groups and allows the narrative of the film to be  captured, frozen in time.  I really am enjoying producing this series of work, it is incredibly labour intensive, which again, seems apt for the context of the work here in India.

The gujarati for each scene has been patiently provided by Palak again, what would we do without herself and Lokesh!!??

I hope to also manage a couple of papercuts this week, as there is one lady in particular whose portrait will provide an amazing papercut silhouette.  More to come.  I'll also upload images soon from the drawing workshop yesterday, as well as some images of the children's fired cups but see flickr as usual for recent images of work in progress.  We also had a new floor the other day.  Off to Laxmi again on Wednesday to fire the final set of pieces, so must get on with cutting gujarati text - it takes a long time!!!