The high-ceilinged studio that V. Anamika shares with her husband, N. Ramachandran, is covered with their respective art. Taking pride of place at the moment is a large piece, covered in circles, cut out from various regional newspapers from across the country, placed on a grid marked on a gold-coloured base. “That took me nearly two months to make,” she says, with a satisfied smile, knowing the effect it can have. From afar, it looks textured, but up close, it draws you in, and has you noticing tiny details. “That’s the kind of response I want when people look at my work,” says Anamika.
Winner of the 55th National Lalit Kala Akademi Award in 2014, the city-born artist revels in creating art that is interactive, not necessarily physically, but on a more subconscious level. Anamika attributes this to her practice of Vipassanâ, and her admiration for theBuddhist way of life, which she says changed the way she looked at her art. “When I used to meditate and shut out the world, I could finish a work of art in five minutes flat. Once I started Vipassanâ, it taught me to be free, to let the world in… I made a conscious decision to spend more time with my art as I created it.”
This led Anamika to make her own rules, like working compulsorily for five to six hours a day. “Like in a game, there must be a challenge to overcome; only then will I have sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. I don’t want to produce a lot, but I want my work to have a density to it, and be synchronous physically and technically, and with myself. It should encapsulate details and sensitivity, should match with life itself, and also be a conversation starter,” says the 40-year-old artist. However, she is quick to clarify that there are only subtle nuances in her art, and that it is meant to be multidimensional, with no concrete message intended.
While working on a series that depicts repetitive designs — she has a preoccupation with the circle — Anamika simultaneously creates art that is more abstract. “Once I am done with my day’s work, I sit at a table with a blank canvas and just draw. What comes out is instinctive and an amalgamation of thought,” she explains, adding that it was also a process of breaking away from the rules she had been taught in college (Government College of Fine Arts). The latest work that has come out of this practice depicts a Barbie-like doll juxtaposed with different motifs. These will be auctioned to raise funds for the Smile Foundation, an NGO that works with underprivileged children.
Anamika’s art is in numerous public and private collections in Austria, Japan, Korea, Dubai, Malaysia, USA, Canada, Thailand, Pakistan and India, and she has also done a couple of very striking art installations in hotels in Hyderabad and Chennai — in Hyatt Regency and Raintree St. Mary’s Road being one. The latest collaborative project with Ramachandran, along with a Tanjore painter, is at Mumbai’s T2 Terminal, as part of a 3.2 km-long multi-storey wall art installation called ‘India Seamless’ which was inaugurated in December last year. “Curator Rajeev Sethi commissioned us to do the part of the wall that represents Tamil Nadu. It took six months to plan and execute; it was hard work explaining the concept to the painter, as they are used to working on small canvases. But it was completely worth it,” she says.
“Rama and I have travelled extensively within India and in France, Italy, Spain, Scotland, England, Bhutan and Cambodia in the 13 years that we’ve been married. In fact, we were at Angkor Wat, which is one of my most favourite places in the world, when I received the mail that I had been selected for the National award. Since it started ‘Dear artist’, initially we were confused about which one of us it was addressed to,” laughs Anamika. The upper level of the studio is lined with shelves chock-full of artefacts collected from their wanderings around the globe. There are also several walls covered with masks.
It was during one of these jaunts to Ajanta Caves that the inspiration for her current project came about. “Some of the paint had chipped off of one of the walls, and a woman was hastily sweeping it away before her supervisor arrived. But to me, those fragments of paint were very precious as they had been used by an artist so many years ago. I had also been reading up on the theory that everything, both living and non-living, is made up of carbon,” she says. This started off the archival project along with Ramachandran, ‘Proof of Experience With Material’. The idea is to collect 10,000 different materials, conserve and display them. “We got customised identical boxes made with glass lids, and they fit into squares of 100. Each box has one item; for example, one has a pure nugget of gold, another has wax matchsticks,” she says. These will be accompanied by a small note that indicates where they collected it from, and what they know about it. So far, they have over a 1000 items, safely ensconced in a teak cabinet.
Anamika’s four cats have the run of both the studio and her house. She also has numerous types of cacti lined up on the verandah, balcony and terrace, and loves showing them off. An unabashed fan of Rajinikanth, she says that it surprises a lot of people; she doesn’t quite understand why. She says, “No one in my family was an artist, but just the way my mother ran the house, did embroidery and stitched dresses for my brother, sister and me inspired me to take up art.” While her parents wanted her to do architecture to be in line with her civil engineer father, they encouraged her when she decided she would be an artist.
Chennai’s art scene has expanded, but Anamika says we still need more art in public spaces, and that it has to be more accessible. As for artists, she feels that they need to be given places where their work can be exhibited without constraints: “Over the past 20 years, I have been consistently working, irrespective of our financial condition. Now that there are a lot more youngsters serious about art in the city, and I have wondered if, as established artists, we ought to create a collective that might help them out.”
