Catalogue / Janani
See it on a wall
Shown at true size: 41 × 122 cm. A large work, for a big living room, office or café wall. The person is about 170 cm tall. Every work is shown whole, never cropped.
Janani
The present in past
A child and an elder, woven into the same paper
Brown paper over grey ink, under and over, like a mat on a floor.
A girl laughs through the squares. Her eye is whole.
Across the gap an old face waits in silver light. Lines run down her cheek like rain on a wall.
Two small birds stand on worn posts and look in.
Between the panels there is only white.
Each face is half kept, half lost, held by the weave.
The work
Janani grew up in the Nilgiris and studied painting at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in Bengaluru. The present in past is two panels. On the left a young girl smiles. On the right an older woman looks out. Strips of brown paper are woven through both portraits, so each face appears in small squares. Two cut-out birds sit on posts and turn towards each other. Janani lets parts of the image break apart and join again. For her this is how memory works. It changes each time we remember.
In the artist’s words
“I was trying to understand how memories and emotions stay with us even when the moment is gone. I wove, layered and broke parts of the image apart so the materials could show remembering, losing, separating and putting things back together. The uncertainty became part of the work. Memories aren't fixed either. They change as we remember them.”
Not for sale
Shown with the artist’s permission. This work is not for sale.
- Theme
- Memory and what remains
- Material
- Ink drawing, digital print, acrylic and woven paper
- Size
- 40.6 × 122 cm
- Year
- 2026
- About the artist
- Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath
- From
- Coonoor
- Code
- RC-8187
- @asethete_owl
Meet the artist
