Contemporary art tends to look towards the future. Traditional craft, meanwhile, can often carry the weight of generations. When forced together, art or rather the ecosystem around it, tends to demote craft to a mere raw material or exotic backdrop. But true parity sparks a rare alchemy.
Artist residencies often make way for such spaces, where an artist can surround themselves with inspiration, such as the rhythmic movements of women weaving Sabai grass, or stories carried across generations of Dokra artisans, and in the living traditions that continue to shape Odisha's cultural landscape.
The first edition of the Mayurbhanj Residency, held at Baripada in late June, was a collaboration between Mumbai-based contemporary art gallery Art & Charlie and The Mayurbhanj Foundation, and gave way to a conceptual framework for the residency's inaugural artist, Mumbai-based multidisciplinary practitioner Kumar Misal, whose creative vision is shaped by his own agrarian upbringing in Kumbhoj, Kolhapur.
Misal's dialogue with the local craft heritage
The residency was held at the Belgadia Palace, tucked away in Baripada; the 18th-century palace is now both the residence of the Bhanj Deo family and a boutique stay; the emotional centre of the residency, however, lies nearly an hour away in Rangamatia village.
Much of Misal's artistic practice explores rural life, agriculture and environmental change through handmade paper crafted from banana, sugarcane and corn fibres. It is perhaps this intimate relationship with the land that allowed him to find immediate common ground with the women of Rangamatia.
Through conversations with Sabai grass weavers, Dokra metal casters, and bamboo artisans, Misal could rethink the artistic process itself, not as an individual pursuit, but as a shared act of making.
‘I've been here for a little over a month now, and I feel more connected to my roots because there is a public knowledge system here which has been running for many years," Misal explains.
Misal is a graduate of the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, and has a master's in Printmaking. So he often makes his own paper, working in woodcut and etching on grass, but his primary work focuses on natural fibres. "There are many similarities between Kumbhoj and Mayurbhanj," remarks Misal, who was raised in a farming family in Kolhapur's Kumbhoj.
These similarities extended beyond farming traditions to shared ecological concerns. As forests continue to shrink due to mining and infrastructure development, both regions have witnessed increasing human-animal conflict involving elephants, leopards and other wildlife.
Rather than illustrating these concerns independently, Misal chose to work directly with the Sabai grass artisans to produce a body of work shaped equally by his conceptual framework and their material expertise. The resulting artworks are less individual creations than collective expressions, co-authored through dialogue and shared making.
''I got to work with the artisans from the clusters very closely, and came close to working with new mediums, thanks to their patience, their skill and creativity. Take grass, for instance; we often throw it away or burn it. But here it is used to make fishing nets, chatai (mats) and lamps. So it's really about the possibilities; here life is art! For them it may be about their livelihood or daily routines, but for us it is art. This helped shape my thinking and reconcile my art and their artisanal skills and expertise,'' adds Misal.
Beyond the palace walls
The choice of venue for the residency was not incidental. Long before artist residencies became part of the contemporary art lexicon, creative exchange found a home in Mayurbhanj. In the early 20th century, Maharani Sucharu Devi, daughter of Brahmo Samaj reformer Keshab Chandra Sen and goddaughter of Rabindranath Tagore, married Maharaja Sriram Chandra Bhanj Deo of the Mayurbhanj State.
‘HH Maharani Sucharu Devi came to Belgadia as the wife of my great-great-grandfather Maharajah Sri Ram Chandra Bhanjdeo, who was a devoted patron of the crafts and traditions of Mayurbhanj. Together they made these walls a place of arrival for the artists of the Bengal Renaissance in the 1900s,'' shares Akshita M. Bhanj Deo, Director, The Belgadia Palace & Mayurbhanj Foundation
''That instinct, to open a royal home to creative minds and let something unexpected happen between them, never really left us. What we are doing now with Art & Charlie is a continuation of that same impulse a 100 years later. Mayurbhanj has always sat at a remarkable crossroads, where courtly culture met the Chhau dancer, the Dokra caster, the Sabai weaver, traditions that predate and outlast every institution we could name.’
‘Our vision for this residency is to make that exchange live again: contemporary artists inside a living palace, in genuine dialogue with the folk and tribal arts of this region, and a gallery that carries that conversation beyond these walls. Mayurbhanj was always meant to be a knowledge-sharing space for Eastern India. We are simply remembering that,’ she adds.
A close brush with Rangamatia
On the second day of the residency, we visited the Common Facility Centre, where women from the Sabai grass cluster welcomed guests with handcrafted bouquets fashioned from vibrant hibiscus flowers and Ashoka leaves.
We spotted simple mud homes lining the settlement, many built without conventional doors or windows, allowing natural ventilation to cool the interiors. Here, beneath shaded verandas and open courtyards, groups of women patiently weave Sabai grass into intricate forms using the traditional damroo matting technique.
One particularly striking work dominated the space, a large woven artwork that has taken nearly a month to complete. Sitting upon it as they stitched together bundles of Sabai grass wrapped in date palm leaves, the women move with remarkable rhythm and precision.
Seeing the artisans at work also transforms one's understanding of the collaborative pieces being developed during the residency. What initially appears as a contemporary artwork gradually reveals itself as the product of many hands, generations of inherited knowledge and countless hours of labour, proving that heritage is not simply preserved but continually reimagined.
''Mayurbhanj, a region I am getting to know more about through Akshita and her family at The Belgadia Palace, is home to a wealth of cultural knowledge that remains underrepresented within contemporary art discourse. At its core, it's a commitment to co-creation with local artists and practitioners, who remain the true custodians of regional knowledge," says Ayesha Parikh, Founder, Art and Charlie.
"For us at Art and Charlie, this also opens a broader question: how can a gallery extend itself beyond exhibition-making to create frameworks for cultural advocacy? We see this residency as an opportunity to explore new models of supporting regional cultures through collaboration, long-term engagement, and shared stewardship.”
In an era where heritage is often reduced to spectacle, The Mayurbhanj Residency offers a quieter alternative. It urges artists to listen before they create, to collaborate before they interpret, and to recognise that some of the most compelling contemporary stories are already woven into the landscapes and communities that have sustained them for generations. And residencies succeed when they turn these conversations into their most enduring work.
During his residency, Kumar Misal worked alongside the artists from the Rangamatia Sabai Grass Cluster and produced a body of work co-authored with the local artists whose Sabai grass practice shaped it. The final works will be shown during Mumbai Gallery Weekend 2027 at Art And Charlie as his solo show