Collages of Torn Hope

[Guest guest]

The Indian news service Rediff.com today published this special

feature on a rural woman artist, by Samir Dasgupta of the Women's

Feature Service.

 

January 08, 2004 - She has been variously hailed as 'a symbol of

hope and aspiration', 'a barefoot artist' and 'a collagist of torn

hopes.' In the year 2000, she was even honoured with the Sanskriti

Award. But Shakila Sheikh, wife of a vegetable vendor from obscure

Noorpur (about 64 km from Kolkata, West Bengal), is oblivious of how

different she is.

 

Her daily chores are the same as those of any other woman in her

village. What sets her apart from them are her solitary hours of

artistic creativity every night. When asked why she has spent the

best part of her 30-odd years making pictures that do not assure her

material prosperity, she smiles in embarrassment. When asked to

explain the secrets of her technical or stylistic particularities,

which have earned her considerable fame in recent years, she shyly

smiles again.

 

Shakila's work has been exhibited in art galleries in many cities in

India and in Paris, New York, Hanover and Singapore. Yet, despite

her growing exposure to contemporary culture both at home and

abroad, she has never wavered on her choice of themes. These are

drawn directly from life -- baskets of vegetables, domesticated

animals, familiar trees, ducks swimming in ponds, walls around mud

huts, winding dirt roads or an occasional aeroplane flying across

the wide sky. Her social consciousness, too, finds regular aesthetic

expression in her treatment of themes like violence against women

and communal riots.

 

"Each day I create a new image," says Shakila of her Kali series,

where she has portrayed the goddess of destruction in all her

fearful majesty as the omnipresent protector of her village. In one

of her now-famous depictions of the deity, she shows Kali stepping

out of her temple and standing on a railway line to stop a speeding

train from crushing a helpless cow tethered there.

 

Says renowned senior artist, collagist and Shakila's guru B.R.

Panesar, "Shakila's images are original, well-defined and reflect

the rural simplicity of her environment. Each work has an underlying

meaning and message."

 

Shakila's transition -- from a daughter of an indigent mother

selling vegetables on the sidewalk to a known name in contemporary

collage art -- sounds like a fairy tale even though it has only

provided her emotional satisfaction. Her transformation has been

possible because of her grit, courage and ability to confront the

world with love and compassion.

 

Her success and her designs have provoked much discussion,

particularly among contemporary artists with an urban mindset.

Perhaps they find it hard to explain why they like the thematically

simplistic work of a village artist. The answer seems to lie in the

original genius of the medium -- the meticulously torn and arranged

shreds of coloured paper -- Shakila has taught herself to use,

lending commonplace reality an abstract dimension.

 

Says Panesar, "She is an artist by instinct." He adds her use of

paper is unique in the sense that she tears strips of coloured paper

and folds them in a manner as to give them form and volume.

Referring to her essentially intuitive, unpremeditated process of

creation, Panesar once described her as a 'living collage'.

 

A former statistician who used to work with street children, Panesar

recalls the first time he met Shakila. She struck him as a child

with difference even though her clothes were in tatters and she was

fighting to forget her hunger. He began supplying her with old

newspapers so that she could make paper bags and earn a little money

by selling them. Instead, the little girl began making collages with

torn newspaper strips. When she showed the result of her effort to

Panesar, he took the child under his wing.

 

To Panesar's deep dismay, the budding young artist was soon married

off by her mother. Immediately after marriage, Shakila had three

children at fairly close intervals and was increasingly encumbered

by household responsibilities.

 

Within a few years, however, Shakila returned to her hobby. When she

showed her newly created collages to Panesar, he decided to seek the

opinion of other artists on the quality of her work. Their verdict

emboldened him to organise shows of her work. For Shakila, there was

no looking back.

 

She has escaped the wrath of fundamentalists in her own community in

Noorpur, thanks to the good sense of the mixed population in this

otherwise backward village. She lives with her sharecropper-vendor

husband, Akbar, and their three teenage children in a non-too-

congenial joint family set-up since they live in close proximity to

her husband's other wife and her three children.

 

But Shakila has learnt to live with such adversities. As long she

has her art, she believes she can continue to take life's ups and

downs in her stride.

 

URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/2004/jan/08spec.htm