open me carefully
of porcelain, textiles, and the many things to see.
I have started learning to work with porcelain, a material I have always wanted to explore as part of my practise. It has this certain lightness and fragility that I am drawn to, and want to explore. For my first class I was armed with confidence, big ambitions but zero knowledge to make pots like Lucie Rie and Edmund de Waal. It has been an humbling experience since then as it always is when you work with natural materials. Nature has its own way of reminding you to leave your ego at the doorstep. I like that about nature. Anyway back to porcelain —It is so soft, sensitive and gooey. Two of my wonderful friends who are also ceramicists were encouraging and gave me some interesting insights on porcelain. Laura described it as “kind of working with butter” and Rhiannon said this thing about the materiality of porcelain that has made me fall in love with it even more
porcelain is so sensitive, it has an amazing memory too. sometimes it will remember a crack that you mended or it will remember a shape it was previously in and it’ll come out in the firing
I cannot wait to see, and share my experiments with you as I learn to have a conversation with it.
Open me carefully
In other news, I am transitioning open me carefully from website to here as it feels more in sync and just right to have these personal and intimate exchanges land directly in your inbox.
For those of you who are are new/ aren’t aware, open me carefully are intimate exchanges of thoughts carefully revealing parts of us through our perspectives and feelings on colour, culture, consumption among other things. I want to use my space and my art to have conversations—not always the easy ones, more of ones that have many facets and ones that often miss representation of truly diverse perspectives on things that are important to me.
I am so excited to bring you this really beautiful visual documentation of cloth, culture and craft through a woman/friend/storyteller of textiles I admire who wears the saree, a garment I love, with so much elegance and effortless abandon.
Here is Arpitha for you, who kindly agreed to open up her wardrobe of beautiful sarees along with her memories of them. Such a wonderfully woven personal narrative of memories, of rituals of wearing and living with six meters of cloth that carries generations of stories, warmth and love.
I cannot get over these stunning textiles, and Arpitha’s way of wearing and photographing them, and especially how she feels about cotton.
ps - wherever possible have added links for better understanding of some culture-specific terms.
Open me carefully: Arpitha Chandrappa
In folds and tucks, worn and defined by habit, warmed by touch, I find my love for the sari defined by my mother and my late grandmother. Like memory keepers, they have this particularity of time, of a time lost, of the absence, romanticised. I’m a child and a young girl, one sometimes in an urgency to enter womanhood, watching her aunts argue excitedly over saris they’d like to inherit someday. While I grew fascinated with the colours and textures, long before I understood the sentiments, or the love language of textiles with complicated longings - of head and heart, of yours and mine, wrapped in six yards.
As if to remember mornings from my childhood, woken up by the delicate sound of glass bangles and my mother’s voice, as she called my name - and the faint smell of starch from her cotton sari. The hubbub of the morning behind her, I’d find in her undisturbed afternoons, my chance to lay my head in her lap, her starched sari now softened, yield, as her palm drum, lingered and pat my head to the challenge of the crossword or pace of the Kannada novel she’d be immersed in. I can feel the warmth of her bangled hands, I still feel ‘held’ in those moments.
My early childhood summers were a shade of creamy cotton, in my ‘appayya’ grandfather’s pristine all white panche (dhoti) and long shirt, my ‘ammayya’ grandmother’s buttery soft cotton sari and my summer frocks with frills and mango stains - it holds summer’s golden light and cool sweat, mangoes and soft-bellied fryums drying to a crisp on a bed of old cottons in the summer sun. I remember watching my grandmother vigorously and rhythmically beating a bowl of cream and churn balls of creamy white butter, and ask me to cup my hand and place dollops of butter in them.
Even after all these years, I sniff at creamy cottons as if they carry a smell of homemade butter and all things summer.
In the ’90’s before the easy access to shops in Mysore and Bangalore, my mother and aunts would plan for the day the ‘sari men’ as I called them, came hauling bundles of weaves. The scent of starch filled the room, mingled with the sound of glass bangles and laughter, as the women sat around carefully selecting saris. The sari men visited once a year during April-May, bringing beautiful weaves from Bengal, along with their good humour, stories, a business sense and an ability to sell - that saw women buy saris in colours and designs they never thought was their style. It was during those days I learnt of delightful colours like lemon yellow, dewy pink and ice blue. Those men created their own markets while introducing unfamiliar weaves from one part of India to another.
Over time the ‘sari men’ faded but I still have a small part of that legacy, the lemon yellow Tant with green motifs amma chose, and it still feels as refreshing as the sweet lemonade and mango slices served on days they came visiting. What else can cool the heat of a summer afternoon or warm a wintery day like today, quite like a mango stained memory of an old and soft cotton sari?
Cotton for me is almost a sentiment, perhaps the love of my fabric life. From soft to coarse cottons, I’ve shared and followed this love for cotton saris with my mother. It’s sad to watch all the different strains of cotton, individual as the soils in which they grew, disappear with standardisation and a preference for fineness.
Amma tells me I have always been stubborn in my clothes selection, even at 6 years old for my ‘moggina jade’ portrait, a custom of dressing young girls in silk sari and style the hair in jasmine flowers - a tradition practiced in south India, I wanted to wear a blue cotton sari. I’ve wondered where I got my love for the colour blue, and I’m reminded of my magnificent fascination for my grandfather’s deep blue jacket that he wore with his all white attire. As a child I’d stubbornly ask to wear the jacket and sit in his ‘aaraam kurchi’ easy chair pretending to be him, a ruse that I’m told was often effective in making a fussy eater like me eat my food. It’s as if I can paint a shade of blue for each of my shapeshifting years.
Growing up, an introverted child, I often found solace in shifting skies - a constant friend for my own wordlessly eloquent shifting moods, to the many blue pretty dresses my father bought for me from his trips. They were always blue, and regardless our growing differences over years, in blue, we’ve always agreed.
Amma did manage to convince me against wearing the blue cotton sari for the portrait. So, there I stood, flaming - in red lipstick and an onion skin colour Benaras with silver brocade border, my hair strung and decorated with jasmine flowers all over. Oh, how like a woman and how strong I felt in it, even if I was only playing dress-up. When I look at that photo now, of the young girl, I can at least glean confidence from her smiling and self-assured face looking at the camera, looking back at me. A look so convincing that I can almost believe - like she must have back then - that sometimes all you need is an old cherished sari to make you look a little more confidently at life.
With time, I have come to admire that Benaras sari for the silver brocade border.
It might just be me being emotional, but the saris I love most are the ones aged, yet timeless.
When I look at photos of my ‘ammayya’ grandmother, despite her petite stature look statuesque in tall border Korvai Kanjeevaramas of the times, I’m reminded of her quick wit and personality that managed the farms and politics of people, and just as cooly stirred aromas of ancestral dishes on the mud stove, singing familiar songs and telling many a fables. Captured in tinted fading photographs, from a time when there was little time to ponder on the politics of roles and dressing, my ‘ammayya’ was as much a boss, as she was a storyteller who regaled us with stories and songs. Today these saris are rarely woven and harder to find and I am delighted that my mother chose to acquire those tall border saris herself.
Looking at my grandmother’s photos, with her tattooed bangled hands, I think of the songs in which she’d cleverly insert names of her grandchildren, and laugh loudly when we disagreed with the character she’d assigned us. When I drape her old tall border Korvai Kanjeevarams, I’m reminded of how inanimate objects can carry the wearer’s energy. I can’t be with her anymore, put my head on her lap and ask her to sing songs for me again, but I can’t help feeling as she looked tall and strong wearing these saris.
That’s the funny thing about time, isn’t it? Through photographs and saris aged with the patina of time, the love tugs and aches but never ages, like a mother’s for her daughter and a daughter’s for her mother.
I wish you a wonderful art-filled Saturday! There are so many things to see in London this weekend. Things I would really like to see in no particular order, but not sure if I will be able make it to all of them, but if you are in London and can go, go.
4 Indian galleries showing their work at Sadie Coles (This is is on till June 15th)
Francis Upritchard at Kate Macgarry (On till June 11th) (I love love love Francis’ work)
Until next week
x asha
PS: Two photos I have been admiring. Both made by Lord Snowdon of Dame Lucie Rie
Dame Lucie Rie Sat Beside the Korean Pot, 1988
Dame Lucie Rie's Hands Covered in Clay, 1988
Mere mention of lemon yellow and I can taste & feel the lemon puff biscuit sat on the stool in my Nani’s kitchen….