She blows her own glass; casting, shaping, sculpting and frame-working, marrying its delicate ephemeral magic to the discipline of structure. She even revives and reconstructs lost craft skills.
NIFT graduate and craft-trained artist, Anjali Srinivasan's mesmerising glass installations, on view at Apparao Art Gallery (5A Wallace Garden Road), are a shower of luminous blown glass spheres in contemporary formats and spaces that seamlessly integrate to create a ‘Sheesh Mahal' illusion.
Her five years' of training, collaboration with traditional glass artisans from U.P. and India's cultural history of transforming one thing into another has given her a creative vocabulary.
“Every piece I make can be traced to my Indian ethics,” she states.
Her mirror paintings are a reference to the optics of Sheesh Mahal, a lost craft tradition, which, Srinivasan says, she has reconstructed through reflective glass fabric. “I (also) see a constellation or installation every time I walk into a stainless steel store with jars suspended from the ceiling.”
Colours of India
Her pigments are influenced by the colours of street houses in India, yet her work is more defined by the cross of glass and emergent technologies. “I am a projection of the worlds I occupy, that's where my work resides. Part of it is Indian.”
Anjali Srinivasan's ‘Depths of Field' exhibition has blown glass and mixed media installations that seem to redefine the synergy of sculpture, glass and forms, inviting the viewer to participate and reflect.
A 9 ft tall half cylindrical wall of mixed media glitters with hundreds of blown glass spheres, each throwing back the viewer's reflection in colour. The recurring theme of ‘mixed media' also features a half globe alive with reflecting glass spheres of different sizes, like a celestial shower. More spheres are pieced together to form lyrical necklaces.
‘Of Shifting Natures' takes one into the dynamics of moving waves, which are morph out of glass: pigmented and bordered. The exhibition is on till May 30.
