Anju Dodiya

The Shedding

The Shedding by Anju Dodiya is part of a series of mattress paintings the artist creates using fabric stretched on padded and shaped boards. The imagery relates to other paintings in this body work that expresses the visceral and vulnerable side of creativity. The posture of the protagonist—a part-human, part-carapaced animal—is opening herself outwardly. The costume or the metamorphosing body was inspired by an outrageous gown the artist saw featured at the Met Ball. The hybrid form turns the woman/artist into a crustacean of sorts; a shelled being, in the process of shedding her crusted layers, slowly, painfully. The painting illustrates how, for the artist, the studio is a space for shedding ideas and inhibitions; she writes that “the creative self seeks lightness, always”. More broadly, Dodiya’s mattress paintings relate to the intimate and domestic, in which truths of self-knowledge are disclosed through meticulous restraint and creative disorientation, but still rife with energy. These shaped mattresses have grown from her earlier mattress paintings, engaged with sharp forms, now named ‘soft shards’ as reminders of domestic ease coloured by an incurable existential anxiety. The works are overlaid and interrupted by watercolor and charcoal drawings and prints. Dodiya sometimes includes collage-like interventions in these works using fabric sourced from different geographies, as vibrant disruptors.