Flowers before breakfast - Steve

Up at 5.30a.m. to visit the local flower market, bustling and busy with the Navratri (Nine nights) festival getting into full swing. Just coming to the end of a whirlwind week here at Arts Reverie, a restored haveli located in historic Dhal Ni Pol in the old city of Ahmedabad. I'm juggling two collaborative projects whilst here, the Pol Project (with Amanda and CJ) and Marking the City (with Kate Egan - unfortunately not here with us) and both of these will feature in the Ahmedabad International Arts Festival (AIAF) towards the end of this month....the pressure is definitely on!

The Pol Project is investigating the social aesthetics of the urban environment within the Pol, looking at the individual ways that local people 'find beauty' in their environment (resonating with the umbrella theme of the AIAF, Making Beauty.) My role within this is to create a site-specific artwork in the heart of the Pol, and a series of smaller related pieces, which will act as temporary 'way markers' to guide visitors to the artworks within the Pol. Marking the City is to consist of a series of digitally printed textile banners, focusing on floral motif's inspired by the prints of master wood-block carver Maniklal Gajjar of Pethapur (a traditional community of wood-block carvers, located close to Ahmedabad city). The proposed site for these banners is the historic Ellis Bridge, which links the old and the new parts of the city, just as the banners will link traditional and digital printing technologies.

Our guide, mentor, collaborator, food advisor and all-round 'Mr Fixit' while we are here is Lokesh Ghai, a textile artist trained at NIFT and now living and working in Ahmedabad. Lokesh is facilitating our many strange and diverse requests with enthusiasm, grace and good humour, helping us to tap into the appropriate local knowledge and expertise, making introductions, arranging our meetings, selecting and sourcing local materials, equipment and technology.

This first week has been spent researching and 'mapping' the Pol, getting to know some of the people, trying to understand the social dynamics of the space, developing, discussing and testing ideas. The highlight for me has been the discovery of a textile printing workshop in the Pol; meeting, talking and taking tea with the owner, Mr Sandip Shah, and watching beautiful lengths of block-printed textile emerge.

Printing table on the ground floor at Mr. Shah's workshop - printing in gold seems to be his signature.

Up on the first floor, block printing in bright yellow onto pre-dyed fabric.

Detail of the finished fabric length.

Up on the roof, resist printed fabric hanging out to dry after dyeing.

Goddesses and watches - Amanda

A few days ago Steve and Lokesh went out for a walk around the Pol. Along the way they met a man who goes house to house buying bric a brac. Amongst the things on his cart he had a small table and two framed prints of Hindu Goddesses.

Steve bought a print of Bahuchara, Goddess of Castration.



And Lokesh bought an old print of the Goddess Durga



Lokesh went home and remembered a catalogue he hadn't looked at for a long time about a collection of restored oleograph prints produced at Ravi Varma Press. Raja Ravi Varma was a painter (1848 -1906) who according to the catalogue combined Eastern traditons and Western techniques in his paintings of Hindu Gods, Goddesses etc.

Not only is the text of the catalogue written by Esther David, the writer who we bumped into after buying her book, but Lokesh found that inside the catalogue he had carefully placed a print by Mr Gajjar for safe keeping - thus drawing together two coincidences from my previous post.



Once you start tuning into patterns you see them everywhere. Last night we went for dinner with Lokesh and two Swiss friends of his who were visiting Ahmedebad - art historian, ethnologist and former political scientist Marie Alamir and the artist Mali Genest www.maligenest.ch

Mali brought a catalogue of her work for Lokesh. One of the pieces reminds me of the print bought by Lokesh from Mr Gajjar.

Mali Genest's work

Mr Gajjar's print

detail of Mali Genest's work

And then Marie spotted that she and I were wearing the same watch...

Coincidences - Amanda

Yesterday I went to fetch CJ from the airport and to video her arrival. I'm collecting lots of different material for the piece I'm planning to show in Dahl ni Pol a couple of nights before I leave. Whether this fragment will be included or not I'm not sure yet.

Steve and I have been here several days now. Helped by our colleague Lokesh Ghai we have made contacts, bought supplies and played around with materials and ideas. But neither of us have got around to setting up the blog we promised in our research proposal. CJ got straight onto it and by the end of her first evening there was no reason not to blog.

One thing that stands out is coincidence, synchronicity - call it what you will. There have been a few examples, but I'll restrict myself to two in this post to avoid stretching credibility.

Coincidence number one
I came on board the Pol Project later than CJ and Steve. As we were talking about how my interests would integrate with theirs, I mentioned that my only other visit to India had been a six week trip to Ahmedebad with my sister in 1980. She'd won a travelling scholarship and I'd gone along to keep her company.

As we discussed the Pol Project, Steve explained that he and Kate Egan were working on an additional installation taking a woodcut by "someone from Pethapur Village - a master wood block cutter called Mr Gajjar" as their ispiration.

I emailed my sister. I had a visual image of a house several storeys high with a number of young apprentices sitting at floor level carving blocks - but I couldn't remember his name or the name of the village.

Ant sent me the transcript of her diary entry for that day:

Sept 27th 1980
Pethapur village, about hour bus ride and 5 mins rickshaw from Gandhinagar. Blockmaker Shri Maneklal Mistry Gajjar the beeba-wala. Made a master craftsman in 1979, has up to 10 apprentices. They come from the local area, about 20 apply, then a committee from the All India Handicrafts (?) come from Bombay and he sets the applicants little tasks to do in front of the committee and about 6 children are selected to train. They are paid 80rps a month by the government. Maneklal provides the wood and anything the apprentices make belongs to him...(cont.)

Mr Gajjar is so well known that it would strange if Ant hadn't arranged to see him, given that she was researching Indian textiles - but it was great to discover I had this connection to the project.

Coincidence number two
On our second day here Lokesh took us to see Debashish Nayak, the Advisor to the Heritage Programme for Ahmedebad Municipal Corporation. While we were in his office he mentioned a book about the old part of Ahmedebad called The Walled City by Esther David. The following day at the bookshop Crossword I bought it, happy to discover it is a novel - the only one I can afford to read on what is definitely not a holiday. Just as we were leaving the shop, Lokesh stopped momentarily and asked me to give him the book.

A woman who had just stepped out of an Auto was walking towards the bookshop and Lokesh was approaching her.

"...and these are my colleagues from Manchester," he was saying as we caught up with him "and Amanda just bought a copy of your book."