writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

Voicing the everyday – Maternal being just one aspect of the genderization of my identity, as my
domestic responsibilities increased, I became the ‘artist‐mother‐homemaker’. With this extended
identity the home became a space for a routine for the everyday activities such as cooking, feeding,
cleaning, grocery shopping , etc. It involved daily encounters with cluttered objects, utensils, food
grains, dirty clothes, garbage bins etc. which gradually became the world I lived in, at times by choice
and at others out of not having one. Gradually as I reconciled with these objects and my routinely
association with them, they became a source of making larger meaning about life to me, beyond
their functionality. The series Home In/Out (2010) resulted from this making sense of the everyday
objects of domestic consumption, towards an introspection of our environmental concern. The
objects became forms in my works to build a critique of the choices of consumption in the
metropolitan supermarket and consumption overload and hoarding in domestic spaces. Likewise the
domestic acts such as purchasing grocery became the methodology of making art. Being in the
domestic life, I began to see the outside world through this window of role‐performance.
In The Consciousness of
Consumption (2011, see image
4)my consciousness towards the
choices of consumption in the
urban consumer culture evolved
into a commentary. I made
the act of purchasing as the
process of creating my work
itself. Over a period of time
during weekly shopping at the
supermarket, I collected the
grocery paper bags in which I
carried the goods home. These
brown paper bags
as physical objects provided
me with the very spaces for
introspection, within which I
had bought the goods. Once
Image 4. The Consciousness of Consumption
Conte, pencil and ink on fourteen grocery paper bags, 2010 (Home
In/Out Series).
emptied they now became spaces for rethinking the very choices of consumption I made through
them for a more conscientious life. Issues of vegetarianism and environmental concern stemming
from consumption; emerged as drawings in charcoal, conte and ink on the surface of the brown
paper against which I drew in (black) charcoal, coloured conte and black ink. As the weekly purchase
followed, the work began to grow and develop and evolved to incorporate the several pieces making
a cumulative meaning. In other words the duration of the purchases in the project was also the
duration of the work of art; the boundaries between domestic life and art making blurred. 10
Reframing the body / Pain – The body is the physical agent through which the genderisation of
the self is carried out. It is the visible site of the performance of roles which gender imposes upon
one’s identity. The notions of feminity and beauty are constructed around the physicality of the
body. So also the parts of the body such as the breast, the womb, the vagina significantly contribute
to the performance of the gendered roles in life. Any change in these affiliated body parts can
challenge the pre‐conceived performance or the perception of gender around it. In 2012, at the age
of 38, I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. I underwent surgery removing the tumour,
followed by six sessions of middle range chemotherapy. This realization of a malignant growth in my
body, was in sharp contrast with the foetal growth within me as a pregnant woman. Once again the
body became a site for an embodied experience, this time for illness. This also meant that the breast,
otherwise having maternal or sexual connotations now became the subject of medical gaze. I too was
now challenged to relook at my physical body, devoid of the notions of maternity or wifehood, to
rethink of my perception of my own feminity. This made me take up the form of the breast as central
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