The Open Studio / Purabi Roy
Purabi Roy
KHELA HOBEE..
15 minutes to your door, cut into wood by hand
Black ground, white cuts, like scratches on a shop shutter at night.
Faces press together until there is no room left to stand.
A cart tips forward on small wheels and someone keeps pushing.
A sign promises fifteen minutes.
Light falls in a hard white rush from one corner.
Every line is a gouge in wood that cannot be taken back.
The work
Purabi Roy comes from a weaving family in West Bengal. Automatic machines took over the looms and her family had to find other work. This woodcut in three panels looks at that kind of change. Faces crowd every print. A sign in the first panel reads "15 MINUTES". In the middle panel a figure pushes a heavy cart. Roy usually works in pencil pastels and charcoal. Here she cuts each white line into wood and prints it in black ink on paper.
In the artist’s words
“Society is changing through digitalisation, capitalism and machines. I am from a family where weaving was replaced by fully automatic computerised machines, so my family chose another profession to survive. Small grocery shops are replaced by online platforms and pedal rickshaws by battery rickshaws. Still, middle-class people are not only surviving. They also enjoy their daily lives, politics and festivals.”
- Theme
- Work lost to machines
- Material
- Woodcut on paper
- Size
- 50 × 45 cm
- Year
- 2026
- Edition
- 1 of 2
- Framed
- No
- About the artist
- Maharaja sayajirao university of vadodara
- From
- Kolkata
- Code
- RC-506
