By Medhavi Gandhi | Project Leader
For this residency, we collaborated with University of Technology, Sydney. It was amazing to see, how in three weeks, 10 students and four artists bonded together, ate and worked in unison.
This experience was so much more enriching - we had already learnt from our past experience and structured workshops during the day, helped both artists and students achieve much together.
It began with demonstrations - the artists explained the art process to the students, who in turn made presentations on color, trends, textile designs, etc for the artists. The two way exchange led to group excercises, and then finally, working on group projects together.
Aakib Bhai and his group created several variations in Block printing after experimenting through days and nights; Hanif Bhai and his team made an entire ensemble using the technique of bandhani/tie and dye, with some elements of Shibori; Sanju and her girls created smaller embroidered pieces which explored the India-Australia correlation.
During this time, they learnt so much from each other - about each other's culture and more importantly, about each other's work ethic. The artists caught up with words in English, and the students worked on their Hindi!
For the Observation excercise, the artists were taken to Garden of Five Senses - here they saw installations, art works, people of the city, and nature at its blooming best. They then developed individual projects, based on their observations and came up with very innovative concepts and ideas.
Their works were exhibited for the public - who thoroughly enjoyed seeing the experiments,and bought some works instantly!
The real good news comes now - Aakib Bhai will be visiting Australia on a three week study tour to learn more on textile design, and demonstrate his work as well!
In the meantime, Hanif Bhai was featured in Business Standard, New Delhi and has bagged a few exhibitions!
With your continuing support, we have been able to achieve more - this year, we are exploring new ways of working with our traditional artists to make their learning experience richer, and better. We do hope you'd stay with us on this wonderful journey, and pull some friends along !
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