What am I inspired by?
*20 minutes of writing uninterrupted
I take the majority of inspiration from my travels. I spent a year living in India when I was 19. I lived within a community of people in the south of India in a small town called Ongole. It is small, in terms of India but massive in comparison to English towns – bigger than Ipswich. I lived in a hostel with about 150 girls aged between 3 and 19, who became like sisters to me. We lived with them, ate with them, I taught in the school that they went to, teaching English to them and playing games and doing arts and crafts with them to help them learn. It was one of the best years of my life. Within this being immersed in their life I got to immerse myself into Indian culture. I experienced festivals, one of my favourite being the festival of colour Holi. I wore saris and Punjabis everyday as part of my uniform at the school and also because I felt it helped me to blend in better.
We also got the opportunity to travel around the country as part of our breaks for teaching so I have been to loads of places in India and experienced all the different sides of India. I recently re kindled my love for their culture after I went back there for 12 weeks over the summer with my partner. We got to experience traditional block printing in the factory and bought some beautiful fabrics.
I love all the colours and textures that India provides but I am also inspired by the lives of the people that I met whilst out there; they were mainly women that inspired me. I have met plenty of women or girls out there that have been discriminated against due to their gender in their culture and country but yet they are so powerful and strong which is inspiring. I met a women whilst I was travelling and she was only 19 and already 4 children and was pregnant again, to an abusive husband and yet her faith (she was Christian) kept her strong, we worked within a Christian based establishment and the lady that was my Indian mother worked within the local villages to empower women through faith. I love the strength of women, who are in a bad situation and yet they become strong through empowerment and other women giving them strength. I want to highlight these strong and powerful women in my work, I like my work to be big bold and confronting similar to those women attitudes that I experienced.
I have been working with layered prints in my work, using layers of screen prints and mixed media. I have mainly been inspired by the work of Chris Offili but I have been looking at other artists as well such as Christopher Wool and Sigmar Polke. I find that mixed media and screenprinting helps me to get the scale in my work and also the bold prints and patterns mimicking the colours and experiences I had whilst travelling. I am interested in printing on fabric inspired by the textile industry in India and the importance of it. And also the way that it is so important to women as it is a way of expressing themselves through their sarees, their sarees are beautiful all individual and decorated to perfection. One of the things I took from my year in the importance of following what you want to do despite what society tells you that you can do, one of the girls I was living with called Kranthi (18) wanted to be a nurse and she worked hard to get into college, she came from a low caste, a poor family who couldn’t afford to look after her so put her in a hostel to give her an education and she went on to go the university to learn. We became really good friends and I was so proud of her for being what she wanted to be despite being told otherwise by every element in her life.
