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Self-taught creator Anu Kalikal’s exhibition, Lines of Flight, presently connected astatine Alliance Française de Trivandrum, is filled with motifs intimately linked to nature. The accumulation is similar an ode to her aboriginal relation with flora and fauna. Recurring appearances of elephants punctual the creator of elephant sightings successful temple processions during her vacations successful Pathanamthitta, reflecting her yearning for puerility and her battles with intelligence wellness issues arsenic an adult.
Anu, 42, who took to coating astatine an aboriginal age, was into murals portion studying astatine Madras Christian College. After a year’s interruption pursuing her graduation, she joined the Master of Fine Arts programme astatine Stella Maris College successful Chennai. However, she was soon diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar upset aft years of having the symptoms.
Conversations Within astatine Lines of Flight exhibition | Photo Credit: Nainu Oommen
She returned to her household successful Dubai and did not overgarment for 5 years. “I utilized to ideate coating connected a canvas by throwing colours astatine it. That was it,” Anu says.
“One time my assemblage started having tremors, which looked similar epilepsy. When my neurologist saw that, helium asked maine what I preferred to bash successful my escaped time. When I told that I liked to paint, helium asked maine to get backmost to it immediately. His prognosis was that I had stressed retired my assemblage without doing thing for truthful agelong that I got the tremors.”
Restarting took a batch of work, she says. “I spent clip arsenic a unpaid astatine an creation assemblage successful Bengaluru and saw it arsenic treatment. I find creation arsenic a remedy for my wellness issues. You cannot abstracted creation from me. It is an obsession and passionateness for me,” says Anu.
This is Anu’s 17th accumulation and it showcases 27 works, mostly acrylic paintings and pen drawings connected insubstantial with scribbles and dots. “When the tremors are worse, it is easier to usage pens, alternatively than brushes. Since college, I person been a pen artist. The dotting method is therapeutic,” says Anu.
A enactment titled Strength, drawn utilizing a pen and dotting technique | Photo Credit: Nainu Oommen
The Rooster and Me, successful acrylic and alcoholic ink, shows Anu successful a authorities of slumber awaiting the bird’s involution to aftermath her to witnesser the sunrise. In Extinction and Nature, the creator laments the demolition of nature. She questions the explanation of occurrence and its futility if you deficiency compassion. A wide duality emerges from the painting, hinting astatine the anticipation that the creator painted 1 broadside of the enactment during an aggravated signifier of her unwellness and the different erstwhile it had subsided.
The Rooster and Me astatine Lines of Flight exhibition | Photo Credit: Nainu Oommen
In Procrastination, Anu uses acrylic and pen to constituent retired antithetic types of procrastinators who debar existent enactment by replacing it with “sleeps of antithetic kind”. She uses dogs to correspond each of them, kept adjacent to a wall, a clock, and a swing— each representing reasons for delaying work.
The creator uses a pen to gully Speed, an artwork containing horses, arsenic they appeared to her during a dream. Unable to hint wherever they came from oregon wherever they went to, the enactment infers the animal’s unwillingness to clarify a purpose, ambition, oregon destiny.
Scenes from Lines of Flight | Photo Credit: Nainu Oommen
Anu besides further questions the world of her dreams—a grounds of her illness, she says. “When you person episodes of psychosis, you hide a batch of things, you are incapable to separate betwixt what is existent and what is not,” says Anu.
She besides showcases 2 sculptures astatine the exhibition. One is simply a woody elephant, spotted with bindis. “Everything I bash has dots, truthful I thought wherefore not for this too,” says Anu. The Sitting Artist, an installation made of medicine strips, is simply a self-representation—the pills successful the integrative cases were consumed by the creator herself. “It is simply a connection of occurrence astir a travel I went through,” says Anu.
The Sitting Artist, a sculpture made of medicine strips astatine Lines of Flight | Photo Credit: Nainu Oommen
The creator adds, “Many radical person connected with the exhibition; immoderate of them person intelligence wellness issues oregon cognize radical who are going done the same. It is inactive a taboo taxable successful Kerala and not casual to accept. However, things are getting better.”
Anu Kalikal’s Lines of Flight is connected till October 10.
