ROLE: ILLUSTRATOR, DESIGNER, ANIMATOR
I was responsible for conceiving of, researching & executing a unique project that aimed to bring together The Plated Project, a startup aiming to address food insecurity in India through art, and artisans working in traditional Indian styles across the country.
The first step was to research a select number of art styles that we wanted to start with: We chose the styles of Gond, Kalighat and Pichwai to start with, styles that many Indian audiences may have seen before but may not know much about. Through reading more, I realized that these were all art styles about god or devotional in some way: We decided that the best way to tell the stories of the people was to make a set of plates, one about a person who has had a significant impact on the art style as we see it today, and one about a myth that is often depicted in the art. The art on each plate was made with several rounds of collaboration with artisans that I was introduced to over the course of this project, who partially hand-painted each plate.
To bring the end consumer a little closer to the subject matter and appreciate the art forms in a new way, we made both, hand painted plated that were by artisans and DIY plates printed on mounted canvas for everyone to make their own objects of art and find out about what they were painting through accompanying materials. The sum total of this project was to affect the lives of over 50,000 rural artisans, whose practice we were able to support through sales of each item, in addition to featuring and financially supporting the six artists who painted each plate. This projects continues to grow in new ways every year, and aims to cultivate a better understanding of our traditional art forms in everyone who comes across it.
I also was responsible for the social media rollout for this project, which involved things like making a logo animation that is still in use for new iterations of the project, and a visual language for all communication that related to Past, Present, Future. One item that I designed and was also little stickers that used important symbols from each art form, like flowers, birds and peacock feathers.
As a creative exercise, I also took on the task of playing with the sum total of what I had learnt through this project for internal uses: I was playing with the symbols of each to understand the commonalities and points of difference between the three art forms I had been studying, and noted that all had a reverence to nature, but in totally different ways: I created a sort of mural that was meant to be a set of napkins for a meal, which reflected on the idea of a forest, including symbols like the cat with a crayfish from Kalighat art, lotuses from Pichwai paintings, which are synonymous with their patron god. I think that while the Gond people are animists who believe nature is god, Pichwai artists see items in nature as touched by god and holy by association, while Kalighat artists see nature and society as mirrors of each other. I tried to bring these perspectives together in my small series of napkins and coasters, which can be used as decoration or points of reflection during a meal.
