Ash and After

Amid the ruins and rhythms of our times, Anju Dodiya paints what remains—empathy, imagination, and quiet endurance

- Arshia

ARTIST ANJU DODIYA'S PRACTICE is a mirror and a reflection all at once. Born in Mumbai in 1964, she graduated from the city's Sir J. J. School of Art in the '80s—a time in her career when Dodiya adopted the watercolour as her chosen medium of expression. One could immediately tell why; it was only in the wispy strokes of this medium that Dodiya could effectively capture the depths of the artist, the person, and the art that sat between them both. She engaged with feminine locutions that drew heavily from artists who had made a home within her—a chaotic cross between a Sylvia Plath and an Ingmar Bergman on one side, and Italian artists Piero della Francesca and Giotto on the other. The range tends to astonish, until one encounters her sudden and complete departure from the delicacy of watercolours, with the severity of charcoal.

Since 2005, she has pushed her artistic reinvention further with acrylic-on-mattress installations and experiments with shards of broken mirror. This year, Dodiya's latest show, The Geometry of Ash, at Mumbai's Chemould Prescott Road, is really a documentary of the violence of our times. In this new body of work, comprising a series of large-scale colour-infused fabric panels and a suite of works on paper, Dodiya marries women with trees—the ones fast disappearing—like portraits of ancient ‘logs’ of wood, melding with the image of stoic women who charge ahead, unfazed.

Your work has long revolved around the fictional self-portrait. At this stage in your practice, does the 'invented self' still feel like a mirror-or has it become a mask you negotiate with?