NELLY SETHNA

Nelly Sethna (1932-1992) is a name we’ve all heard of but not enough has been written about the depth of her contribution and talent. So, we at AD jumped at the opportunity offered by Mumbai-based gallery Chatterjee & Lal, as they planned a retrospective of the artist’s three-decade-long career. Through these images of Sethna’s historical tapestries and a deeply insightful essay by Nancy Adajania, we hope to offer a glimpse of the scale and materiality that Sethna’s art embodied. Her philosophy was drawn partly from Scandinavian modernism, courtesy of her Nordic mentors at the Cranbrook Academy, and the Arts and Crafts lineage of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, and it all came together in Sethna’s warps and wefts in the context of India. A six-foot textile mobile sculpture made in wool, wire and glittering Lurex; a three-story wall-hanging in the stairwell of the Ford Foundation in Delhi, ceramic murals for the lobby of Joseph Allen Stein’s Express Towers in Bombay—Nelly Sethna’s excellence is present for us to view, touch and marvel at.

- NANCY ADAJANIA

Nelly Sethna sits in her wheelchair, at her loom, stretching yarn between her fingers. Eventually her body would give up its struggle with multiple sclerosis. Sooni Taraporevala’s subtle portrait conveys the generative tension of much of Nelly’s working life, bracing her between a wall-mounted crucifix and a martial Rajasthani puppet, ready to mow down whatever comes in the way of the dance of life.

My experience of curating the first-ever retrospective of the all-but-forgotten fibre artist Nelly Sethna (1932-1992) has been, by turns, exhilarating and frustrating. Exhilarating because every new piece of material evidence—or clues held by fading marginalia—has corroborated a hunch that I was developing through my research. Frustrating because the evidence was so hard to come by, dispersed as it was across uncatalogued information, the fragmentary memories of those who had known her, and folklore that I had to verify against the chronology I was reconstructing.