Jaysheee Chakravarty

connectedness

Jayashree Chakravarty

A WIRED ECOLOGY

FEELING THE PULSE

First published in India in 2023 by Akar Prakar

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Text© Akar Prakar and Roobina Karode

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ISBN: 978-93-94501-08-9

Copyediting: Smriti Verma & Siddhi Shailendra

Editorial Management: Smriti Verma & Siddhi Shailendra

Design: Shilpi Chauhan Chakraborty

Photography: Debanjan Das, Pawan Kumar / The Creative Wale

Proofreading: Marilyn Gore / Mapin Publishing

Publishers: Reena and Abhijit Lath / Akar Prakar

Printed at Archana Press, New Delhi

Captions

Front cover: Detail of Twigs to Creepers, see p. 33

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Jayashree Chakravarty

A WIRED ECOLOGY

FEELING THE PULSE

A Wired Ecology

Roobina Karode

Jayashree Chakravarty is drawn to lines that she perceives in nature, where everything appears webbed and connected. From roots to stems, from textures to armatures, twigs to creepers, the continuity of linear patterns and their formations have always fascinated the artist. To her, they symbolize nature’s immanence as a ‘wired ecology’. Jayashree keenly observes how the changing seasons leave their marks and traces on the surface of the terrain, how the jagged lines of the barren trees in fall stand out like silhouettes against the sky, and the wind, storm and pouring rain create their own imprints on the face of the earth. Through prolonged workings, Jayashree brings to bear upon her paper scrolls and canvases, the regenerative quality inherent in nature. Within the rich layering in her works, we find delicate roots or skeins of medicinal plants and ropes/straws buried under, while some palpable ones like swollen veins breathe closer to the skin. The canvas carries raw furrows of paint that the artist directly creates on the canvas with rare brilliance—unpremeditated and messy, but capturing the palpable connectedness of natural forms.

For a long time now, nature has been the subject as well as the substance of Jayshree’s art. Her works draw sustenance from the organic materials she puts to use, collecting dry leaves and dry flowers, twigs and delicate branches, roots and medicinal seeds, and now, crushed shells as well, weaving and mending, as if the ruptured fabric of life. An accomplished painter, her densely composed canvases in the past decades exploded with excessive imagery both gestural and visceral, drawing viewers into the vortex of unsettling inchoate landscapes, colliding aerial and frontal views, and subverting any static vantage point. Here, the painted lines along with dry twigs, crushed shells and tiny stuffed rags stir up an intricate visuality, drawing our attention to an assembly of nesting and flowing lines, rapid and languid, all threading a maze, camouflage and the raw fecundity of nature.

Jayashree has also created monumental cocoon-like structures to make us step into an insect’s world or the alien sphere where humans are the least dominant species. Through her art, she envisions and urges for a less divisive place on earth that is fertile with possibilities of cohabitation and coexistence.

A WIRED ECOLOGY 7