For the past eight months, I have been working extensively with children in a rural context as an arts facilitator at the Azim Premji School in Yadgir, Karnataka. My intention to work in this context has been to step out of the urban bubble and find out how my conditioning would play out in cultures that I broadly claim identification with, but have never actually gained much lived understanding of.
The crops in the fields that I ride through everyday have given me a very different understanding of routine. The same crop is different each day, the same child seldom predictable. But the routine of sowing, growing and harvesting is as programmed as enrolling, schooling and graduating. What is the connection between art and school when art in fact seems to be more about un-schooling?
My recent works have in some ways been reflections on the routines of painting. The frame that holds the image is as much the culture that conditions expression.
Design and pattern interest me not just visually but for the structures they represent. I revel in repetition for its potential to sensitise an environment towards even the slightest change in pattern, a deviation from the norm; and yet I despise it for breeding a seductive tendency to conform to a programme. I try to work with this contradiction with the hope of finding something new through generative processes of retelling.
Malavika Rajnarayan
2017
Malavika Rajnarayan 