Shelly Jyoti

from Journal of Creative Arts & Minds - Vol. 8, Fall 2023

Pronab Barua

JCAM: Where were you born and does that place still influence you? Where do you live now and how does that place influence you? Do you have family, friends, or fellow artists who support you in your work, life and art making?

SJ: I was born in a small town in Haryana called

Rohtak, and my father was one of the chief technocrats working with the government at the time. We soon moved to Delhi and then Chandigarh, and although I haven’t visited very often, Haryana is where my family roots lie.

Most of my schooling was in Delhi, which, you know, is one of the main centers of culture in India, as well as the seat of national politics. I now live in Gurgaon, and being this centrally located in the Indian artistic and cultural spheres has made many opportunities and collaborations possible. I am fortunate to have received support from the Indira Gandhi National Centre the Arts (IGNCA) and the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA).

I have also had the chance to collaborate with and be commissioned by some of India's best-known design houses, like Good Earth. In terms of individual artistic collaborators, I have worked closely with Professor Laura Kina at DePaul University. She is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and academic, and our interests and "projects" (to borrow from de Beauvoir) often align.

I have also been blessed with an incredibly supportive family - parents, husband and children - who see the value of my work.

JCAM: When and how did you start making art? Why do you make art now? What are you trying to communicate with your art? How has your work changed or developed over time?

SJ: I started making art at a very young age, five to be exact, although I did not recognize it as art then — art being such a loaded, context-heavy term. The walls in my childhood room, my home and my school notebooks were always replete with various sketches of eyes — some quick and cursory, others well-detailed. I did not understand the significance of eyes as a motif at that age, but in retrospect, I do wonder if it created a degree of watching, observing and reflexive within me. Without any theoretical underpinnings, my study of eyes was my way of understanding and being in my world.

Of course, now that I am older, I have a better sense of the world — spatially and temporally, and how it works. I am more aware of the relational experiences of people, of the experiences of others and my own over time. I have come to learn and assemble cultural and artistic theories that ground my work, and have continued to learn the multiple dimensions of these.

I maintain that M. K. Gandhi's theories relating to community and nationhood have a massive influence on my artistic practice. In his time, these were radical theories for communal organization and resistance, and I attempt to maintain their contemporaneity in a different era now, since I believe that they contain eternal and immense potential.

In this growing understanding of the world and my place in it as an artist, my artistic tools and techniques have definitely changed. I was always a multimedia artist, and started out with acrylic on canvas, dry pastels and pens. I was never really afraid of an assortment of art media. However, my work really settled and gained focus once I began to work through Gandhian theory, through Khadi and Ajrakh. Since then, I have explored the materiality of textiles and the Ajrakh craft. I think textile crafts call to me since they have always been used communally to narrate culturally and historically significant stories. They mediate, and perpetuate these narratives.

JCAM: Do you have any creative patterns, routines or rituals associated with your art making? What is your most important artist tool(s) and why? How do you know when a work is finished? What new creative medium would you love to pursue?

SJ: Since I have explored my craft for more than a decade now, I have identified certain creative patterns. It takes me about two years to create a body of work. This begins with identifying the inspiration that will inform the techniques and details of this collection, ruminating on and clarifying what I wish to express with a new body of work and creating mock-up designs on paper. I then fly to Bhuj, where my Ajrakh artisans live and work. I communicate my concept to them, following which my printing and dyeing process starts.

Ajrakh is a 4,500 year old textile craft that uses resist printing techniques and natural dyes to create intricate, wrought canvases, filled with blues, maroons, blacks and whites in culturally significant motifs and arrangements. The nature of the craft is such that, while I can be reasonably assured of the end-result, I can never be too sure if my experiments with textile and the alchemy of natural dyeing will turn out exactly as I envisioned.

As such, this process is never finished for me as an artist. I do have to draw the bottomline though when I begin structuring the artwork, that is, to finish its raw edges, and provide some supportive linings. In effect, it is equal to crossing my t's and dotting my i's on the project.

I am able to maintain openness regarding my media and final forms of presentation. I have already used multimedia forms to create my work, diptychs and triptychs to structure them, and various forms of installations — some interactive — to present them. With each project, I am unafraid to explore media, regardless of their constraints, which I only see as opportunities for newness.

JCAM: What strategies could you share with other artists on how to become successful professionally? What interesting projects are you working on at the moment? What are your artistic goals for the future?

SJ: I think all artists should be passionate and driven about what they are doing — their convictions should move them and flow through their bodies of work. I am inspired by building moral and peaceful societies and am extremely observant of the participation of the self in a collective consciousness. Although the principle being one for many and many for one is cross cultural, they were first executed towards action in Gandhian philosophy, mobilized for the freedom of a nation. It is these philosophies which I attempt to contemporarize in my work.

My work, themed around swavlambhan, or self-dependence was recently installed in the New Parliament House in New Delhi. This body of work features Ajrakh print on hand-loomed, handwoven Khadi fabric, gilded with golden Zardosi embroidery.

I want to continue within this line of inquiry and practice, telling stories of India and its people through the textile traditions of Ajrakh and indigo printing. With one installation in the Parliament house, which I believe was an empowering feat for the artisans I work with, I want to continue to bring craftspeople and craft narratives into more institutional settings.

JCAM: What or who inspires you? Do you have a favorite – or influential – living artist? What work of art do you wish you owned and why?

SJ: When I was a student of literature, William Blake was a poet who first inspired me. Studying his work led me to the artistic dimensions of his work and offered an introduction from the literary arts to visual arts. As I mentioned, folding in a larger sense of the world as I moved along in my life, I found Blake to be a genius of his time and form — in the way works were grounded in his particular philosophy and his human response to living in his time.

I also began reading about Gandhi decades ago, and in a similar tune, found him to be a living artist as well — a revolutionarily successful one at that. His philosophies, suffused in every way of life, including the Arts, influenced an entire generation of people to take charge of their societies and administrations, which not only changed India's destiny, but also touched the world.

JCAM: Where do you find ideas for your creative work? What does being creative mean to you? What is the best advice you ever had about how to be more creative?

SJ: M. K. Gandhi is one of my biggest influences, as I have mentioned. I find his philosophy to be perpetually relevant to my society and the global society at large. On a similar note, I draw my ideas and sense of place from history, and historical accounts with contemporary relevance, as in my Salt March exhibition and the Indigo: Blue Gold exhibition. Creating based on Gandhian philosophy, for me, is meditative — a process that involves my focus and devotion to the artwork in a sense. I studied art peripherally during my education, as an elective while I studied English Literature. Outside of this, no one taught me art. I have this approach to thank for my easy willingness to embrace new media and formats, because, in my experience, those who learn art at an institution can often become defined by their chosen medium.

JCAM: How was your art practice affected and/or changed by the COVID pandemic?

SJ: I spent the time during the pandemic at my most reflexive and creative. I created art, experimenting with multimedia at this time, for a solo webinar show, called Epoch 2020.

The lived experiences of COVID made us all familiar, overly so in some cases, with emotional, psychological and spiritual trauma, making us ask deeply existential questions about ourselves and our relationships with the others that occupy our time and space. Epoch 2020 was conceptualized to process this fractured temporality, and Gandhi's philosophies became particularly relevant, in the present tense, at this time. His emphasis on community care, and reliance on oneself as a source of strength and reservoir or resilience, resonated with me and followers of my work at the time.

Folding in Gandhi's philosophy of swadharma and swadeshi all the more into my process, I believe, aptly reflected my journey as an artist in the decade prior.

JCAM: What other events in your life, if any, have affected the way in which you make art, or changed the direction of your art?

SJ: I suppose one of the other events within my lifetime that has had an immense impact on my outlook as a practitioner was the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai. They occurred in 2008 and debilitated the metropolis of Mumbai. While the media was quick to recognize the resilience of the city and it's multi-cultural, multi-modal inhabitants in the aftermath of this attack, there was an overall sense of being stupefied that such a thing could happen — that organizations could infiltrate and invade a space and take away a city's sense of stability and peace. I underwent an awakening as a citizen, recognizing the importance of communal resilience and activation. This shaped my subsequent work as an artist, and strengthened my convictions in Gandhian philosophy.

Contact information: Shellyjyoti12 @gmail.com | 91 9582252062 | www.shellyjyoti.com

THE BLUE GOLD Indigo Trade Influences, 2023

Ajrakh printing, dyeing, and needle work on khadi, 66 x 64.5 inches