When she glitzed up the common garden at her apartment — Srimayam on First Seaward Road, Valmiki Nagar — adding artworks to it, which she crafted all by herself with upcycled tyres, engine-oil cans and PET bottles, artist Chitra Mandanna received all-round appreciation from the community. There were no thank-you notes, but the gratefulness was unmistakable.
“Everybody started giving me old tyres,” Chitra chuckles at the memory.
She politely turned down this generosity, as a huge chunk of the exercise — precisely, the one involving the tyres — had proved quite a handful.
“It is extremely difficult to cut the tyres; it requires muscle power,” says Chitra.
Knowing she had green thumbs, around seven years ago the apartment association had entrusted the care of the garden to her. Trotting alongside the responsibility was the freedom for her to make choices entirely at her discretion. It was not long before the community realised what giving an artist-neighbour sufficient elbow room can achieve for them. The beautification effort is marked by tyres upcycled into planters, with three of them depicting birds (with an uncanny resemblance to hornbills) and another, a horse-carriage.
Chitra had used tyres of smaller dimensions, those that go with mopeds, for the creation of the three birds — despite that prudent choice, the effort proved back-breaking still. For the planter crafted to resemble a horse-drawn chariot, she had chosen larger tyres. “For the chariot, I had also picked up industrial bobbins,” Chitra recalls. Other notables include painted pet bottles forming the edging on sections of the garden.
When The Hindu Downtown set foot in this apartment garden on Friday, it found the birds and the other artworks largely intact, but weather-beaten. The paint has peeled off.
“These installations require maintenance, and as I got busy, I was not able to spare enough time for it.”
With some dabs of the brush, the artworks should get back to looking their best. However, as it is, even with the fading paint, the charm of this community-based upcycling exercise has not lost its sheen
