Important Notice

Part of a series of mixed media works that Anju Dodiya produced during a residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute in 2007, the present lot, a monumental diptych on handmade paper and fabric, recalls the artist’s early work in both its technique and subject. While the fabric panel, with a screen printed image of a hand holding a pair of shears, is reminiscent of her earlier paintings on patterned cloth and mattresses, the other panel... Part of a series of mixed media works that Anju Dodiya produced during a residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute in 2007, the present lot, a monumental diptych on handmade paper and fabric, recalls the artist’s early work in both its technique and subject. While the fabric panel, with a screen printed image of a hand holding a pair of shears, is reminiscent of her earlier paintings on patterned cloth and mattresses, the other panel directly references the artist’s 2001 watercolour and charcoal work, Rain.

As in its predecessor, here, the entirely benign phenomenon of a rain shower is transformed into an alarmingly malevolent one. Instead of harmless drops of rainwater, the subject, another printed image from the artist’s vast archive, is caught in a downpour of razor-sharp shards of mirrored glass. Among these images of violence, Dodiya stencils two lines from the last stanza of Sylvia Plath’s 1962 poem The Bee Meeting, where the poet likens a bee keeping experience to her life, under constant threat, and then to her eventual death. Much like Plath did, Dodiya is able to step back from situations to examine and creatively record the intense emotions that she experiences in them. However, while Plath was dealing with chronic depression and suicidal urges, Dodiya’s concerns center on the violence that her artistic process and the search for the ideal image wreak on her.

According to Nancy Adajania, “Dodiya admits to having been impressed by Plath’s ability to structure pain and stare unflinchingly into the face of death; what she omits to mention is that Plath’s self-flagellatory tone acts as a mirror for her own masochistic need to sacrifice everything at the altar of the perfect image” (“Birds in a Mirage of Gold”, All Night I Shall Gallop, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, Singapore, 2008, p. 7).

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