Rubber and Raw Silk #3

"Rubber and Raw Silk #3"

I grew up in a post-colonial India obtained by the ideas of freedom through self-sufficiency, struggle, frugality, and the dignity of labor. Along with the politically determined elevation of the weaver caste the cobbler or chamar repaired bicycle punctures or re-soled footwear on the street. In a pre-single-use plastic era, scavenging and recycling was both a way of life and a survival tool and was on its way to becoming a cottage industry.

During Covid, in the era of widespread mask use, I used non-permeable, intestinal inner tubes scavenged from neighborhood bicycle shops, washed them out and sliced them in ways that they could be laid out flat to be upcycled into material for collage. I re-attached the now useless brass air nozzles toward a more formal purpose that points to their previous life and history. Along with the handwoven scraps of raw silk such materials engage with the conversation of culture and migration. 

My work traverses gaps of memory and identity as experienced between my Indian upbringing and as a naturalized citizen of the United States. Using that personal history as filter, this body of work honors the streets of India and the past lives and aesthetics of humble everyday materials, as well as addresses the screens one constructs to distance oneself from its cacophony.

Simultaneously, cubism, modernism, abstraction, and primitivism are part of the lexicon and cosmology of my practice. These materials, these internalized ways of seeing that embody the change and rupture embody those of my own life path in a way to continually navigate the past and present.

Sangeeta Reddy