May you be the mother of a hundred sons
Elisabeth Bumiller
This is the title of a book written by Elizabeth Bumiller. She is a woman that went to live in India in the 1980s and 1990s and she was inspired by the stories of the women that she met whilst living there. This is something very close to my heart as whilst living out there I met many girls and women that have left a huge impression on me. They are powerful and beautiful but are inhibited by the culture of their country.
This is something that has inspired me in the past with my foundation work. I have moved away from this inspiration in my second year work, focusing more on the traces of people. However I really want to go back to the inspiration of empowering women. I want to use traces of people in terms of the stories they make and the traces that they have in other people’s lives.
I have been looking at saris, as they are the underlying way that women in India use to add personality and create their own identity. For this reason I have been looking at the colours and patterns that feature in some of the saris that I bought whilst I was working and living in India the first time that I was there.
The colours that I picked out were contrasting colours, blue/purple and orange. I used these colours to make my image below:
I chose to use the bright orange as the background, as this is the brightness that the women have underneath and then I put the dark colour over the top, this was to chow the controlling and trapping culture that they are trapped in. The colours are also inspired by the colours in my sari.
I then scratched into the wet dark paint the image of a woman with her head covered. This was good but quite hard to see, so I added the white oil pastel as another layer and help to show the face. I kept the image quite simplistic, as the traditional Indian paintings that I have come across in my travels are simplified drawings of the human figure. I am also looking at traditional cave wall drawings as a way of story telling and also a way of telling stories.
