For over seven decades, Ira Chaudhuri held on to her craftsmanship on spherical clay as she redefined the art of pottery. But as age caught up with her, she wound up her pottery studio in her 90s, in 2020 and took to sketching on flat papers, giving rise to beautiful, symmetrical etchings on pen and paper. For years, she made sgrafitto her best friend. This technique that meant roughly sketching on clay was more or less reproduced on flat paper, a testament to the fact that art can be reinvented and channelled through different mediums, no matter the age. A curated display of her recent works, titled Unframed can be viewed at Seagull Books Store.
One gets the freedom of moving across three rooms, full of drawings on paper. Interestingly, these are made over colourful pages, unframed, and positioned on a black background so that the colours are well highlighted. Each sketching has been done with finer motifs like semi-circles, triangles, squares, floral patterns, circles, and more. It is quite easy to look at the artwork and draw a parallel with the traditional Bengali alpona. But Chaudhuri herself claims her inaccuracy in alpona, and on closer look, the artworks are way too symmetrical to actually be classified as one.
One of her original pottery works is also on display beside her major works on paper. This enables one to draw parallel between the etchings on a spherical surface that is profoundly defined by curvature, while on flat surface it is geometry that takes lead.
Filling colours inside her works is what makes them different from other artworks. Each design has at least two to three colours, maybe more, and sometimes she focuses on blacks and whites. Every colour fill made by sketch pen, ink, and fluorescent pens is chosen carefully to complement the colour of the paper and make the design, the hero of the canvas.
Unframed is on display at Seagull Books Stores till January 31, 2026
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