Anu, 42, who took to portray at an early age, was into murals whereas finding out at Madras Christian College. After a 12 months’s break following her commencement, she joined the Master of Fine Arts programme at Stella Maris College in Chennai. However, she was quickly identified with schizophrenia and bipolar dysfunction after years of getting the signs.
Conversations Within at Lines of Flight exhibition | Photo Credit: Nainu Oommen
She returned to her household in Dubai and didn’t paint for 5 years. “I used to think about portray on a canvas by throwing colors at it. That was it,” Anu says.
“One day my physique began having tremors, which regarded like epilepsy. When my neurologist noticed that, he requested me what I most well-liked to do in my free time. When I advised that I favored to color, he requested me to get again to it instantly. His prognosis was that I had wired my physique with out doing something for therefore lengthy that I received the tremors.”
Restarting took plenty of work, she says. “I hung out as a volunteer at an artwork gallery in Bengaluru and noticed it as therapy. I discover artwork as a treatment for my well being points. You can’t separate artwork from me. It is an obsession and keenness for me,” says Anu.
This is Anu’s seventeenth exhibition and it showcases 27 works, largely acrylic work and pen drawings on paper with scribbles and dots. “When the tremors are worse, it’s simpler to make use of pens, quite than brushes. Since faculty, I’ve been a pen artist. The dotting approach is therapeutic,” says Anu.
A piece titled Strength, drawn utilizing a pen and dotting approach | Photo Credit: Nainu Oommen
The Rooster and Me, in acrylic and alcoholic ink, reveals Anu in a state of slumber awaiting the hen’s intervention to wake her to witness the dawn. In Extinction and Nature, the artist laments the destruction of nature. She questions the definition of success and its futility when you lack compassion. A transparent duality emerges from the portray, hinting on the risk that the artist painted one aspect of the work throughout an aggravated part of her sickness and the opposite when it had subsided.
The Rooster and Me at Lines of Flight exhibition | Photo Credit: Nainu Oommen
In Procrastination, Anu makes use of acrylic and pen to level out several types of procrastinators who keep away from precise work by changing it with “sleeps of various form”. She makes use of canines to signify every of them, saved subsequent to a wall, a clock, and a swing— all representing causes for delaying work.
The artist makes use of a pen to attract Speed, an paintings containing horses, as they appeared to her throughout a dream. Unable to hint the place they got here from or the place they went to, the work infers the animal’s unwillingness to make clear a objective, ambition, or future.
Scenes from Lines of Flight | Photo Credit: Nainu Oommen
Anu additionally additional questions the fact of her desires—a symptom of her sickness, she says. “When you could have episodes of psychosis, you neglect plenty of issues, you’re unable to tell apart between what’s actual and what’s not,” says Anu.
She additionally showcases two sculptures on the exhibition. One is a picket elephant, noticed with bindis. “Everything I do has dots, so I believed why not for this too,” says Anu. The Sitting Artist, an set up made of drugs strips, is a self-representation—the tablets within the plastic instances had been consumed by the artist herself. “It is an announcement of success a couple of journey I went by way of,” says Anu.
The Sitting Artist, a sculpture made of drugs strips at Lines of Flight | Photo Credit: Nainu Oommen
The artist provides, “Many individuals have related with the exhibition; a few of them have psychological well being points or know people who find themselves going by way of the identical. It remains to be a taboo topic in Kerala and never simple to simply accept. However, issues are getting higher.”
Anu Kalikal’s Lines of Flight is on until October 10.
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