Jayeeta Chatterjee
Culture, love, laughter and gossip I
With Culture, love, laughter and gossip I she highlights, with floral motifs and the woodcut print composition, the day-to-day stories of homemakers. These are women of multiple ages from lower income homes, a lived experience of Chatterjee’s family, which allows a unique immersion into the multiple layers of textile and embroidery heritage. The camaraderie of the domestic space here forms a bond of understanding between women who are otherwise dismissed and unseen in a patriarchal structure. There is hand holding and creating flower garlands, with some flowers adorning their hair as well. Speaking to the class structure in India, this artwork provides an intimate look at how women claim space in their daily lives.
Chatterjee’s practice reflects upon the lives of female homemakers in the middle-class life of Bengal, her home state, and the intricacies of how domestic labour by women remains ignored in every region. She observes, “These homemakers do important work and yet rarely get respect and somehow there was resonance for me as I work at home too, and people don’t understand the work of an artist either!” Using sarees, a traditional 9-yard cloth worn in India, owned by the women she was documenting also embeds the saree cloth’s materiality with the woodcut print composition of those very women. Her approach utilises Pochampally, a weaving technique from Hyderabad, and Nakshi Kantha, practiced widely in Bengal as an age-old tradition where old saree cloth is repurposed as quilts with decorative stitches and forms a part of wedding trousseaus and gifts. In essence, her practice is a coming together of multiple mediums with a deep engagement.