Related Stories EXPERIMENTAL STREAKOld-world charmART UNINTERRUPTEDLive ArtA splash at 86

Mithu Sen’s workspace takes you to a world of tigers, toy butterflies and skeletons to help keep imagination flexible.

When artist Mithu Sen, 36, leads the way, it is always a surrealistic trip. In 2006, she took critics inside the human mouth by lining a room at gallery Nature Morte with gigantic teeth.
The room in which Sen conceptualised this work is no less unconventional, though the connotations are more personal to the artist. “I chose the innermost rooms for myself. I am an introvert and this is my cocoon,” says Sen about the upper floor of the Alaknanda duplex in Delhi.

Sen’s space looks like that of a teenager who has only recently discovered art. The room is dominated by a huge stuffed tiger and a striped boar that Sen insists is also a tiger. Dolls, puppets and toy butterflies hang from cupboard handles and walls, and the floor is littered with trays of tiny paint bottles and brushes. Add sheets and rolls of handmade art paper and two incomplete paintings that reach the ceiling and you wonder how Sen finds anything in the heap. “Sometimes I don’t, and that’s when my work takes on a different perspective. If I can’t find a blue colour, I might use a red velvet strip. This helps keep my imagination flexible,” she says.

“The things here are not objects for me. They are parts of me, they are my children.The tiger is called Baghu, he is my son. One day, he was cranky and was disturbing me in my work, so I bit him,” she says pointing to the zagged line of tiny white teeth pasted on the tiger’s back. She keeps a hanky with a Shah Rukh Khan print near a current painting because “he is my love. It is not a fan’s love or a girlfriend’s but a love that is undefinable in the modern vocabulary.”

Similarly, a tiny skeleton suspended near the window is Sen when she “was four years old”. The artist is undergoing treatment for a spinal problem, which explains the leitmotif of bones, even fish bones, in her recent works. The skeleton is perhaps a reminiscence of childhood when her back was stronger. “I leave interpretations to my viewers,” smiles Sen.

She works in this room for days and nights on end, creating works that have won her acclaim across the world. “I am surrounded by so much love here. I love to work here, sleep here and wake up here,” she says, adding that this is not a fantasyland but a comfort zone in which reality is infused with new meanings.

Ads By Google