Nilima
SHEIKH India b.1945
Shamiana 1996
Detail, Birth 2
Casein tempera on canvas
255 x 180cm
The installation comprises six hanging scrolls of casein
tempera on canvas and a canopy of synthetic polymer paint
on canvas
Purchased 1996.
Queensland Art Gallery Foundation
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Reproduced by permission
of the artist
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Nilima
SHEIKH India b.1945
Shamiana
1996
Detail, Birth 1
Casein tempera on canvas
255 x 180cm
The installation comprises six hanging scrolls of casein
tempera on canvas and a canopy of synthetic polymer
paint on canvas
Purchased 1996.
Queensland Art Gallery Foundation
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Reproduced by permission of the artist
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Shamiana takes the form of
six double-sided painted scrolls or 'kanat' and a canvas canopy
or 'chandni'. A shamiana is a gathering tent or temporary shelter
which developed into a royal symbol during Moghul times. The
shamiana in this work refers to its popular use as a marriage
tent. Marriage is an event of enormous community interest, and
in India these tents offer a practical solution for the ritual
obligations of the marriage ceremony. They are also easily transportable
structures that house large numbers of people and may be erected
on communal grounds.
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Nilima
SHEIKH India b.1945
Shamiana 1996
Detail, Home
Casein tempera on canvas
255 x 180cm
The installation comprises six hanging scrolls of casein
tempera on canvas and a canopy of synthetic polymer
paint on canvas
Purchased 1996.
Queensland Art Gallery Foundation
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Reproduced by permission of the artist
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The shamiana is also a symbol
of union. Nilima Sheikh's Shamiana uses the various
configurations of love as a means of picturing the private
and public worlds of lovers. Her suspended canvases affirm
the eclectic joy derived from community and from the oral
traditions of song and hymns, of evocations and incantations
from Indian religious writings and of medieval sufi and
bhakti devotional texts of Islam and Hinduism. The lyrical
becomes a means of transporting the everyday gestures of life,
such as sweeping, cooking and sleeping, into the realm of
suspended allegory.
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Nilima
SHEIKH India b.1945
Shamiana 1996
Detail, Song
Casein tempera on canvas
255 x 180cm
The installation comprises six hanging scrolls of casein
tempera on canvas and a canopy of synthetic polymer
paint on canvas
Purchased 1996.
Queensland Art Gallery Foundation
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Reproduced by permission of the artist
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The imagery in Shamiana refers
to a range of iconographies that include Indian manuscript folios
and Chinese silk and paper scroll painting. The architecture
of the scrolls allows the work to be viewed from multiple positions.
The images continue beyond the edges of the scrolls themselves,
creating an environment of colour and fantasy.
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Nilima Sheikh is an Indian artist with a distinguished
local and international career. Much of her work refers
to a range of traditions that act as both a source of
inspiration and a framework within which she explores
her own contemporary vision. |
| Nilima
Sheikh |
These include historical schools
of Indian painting, such as the Bengal School of the 1920s
(which developed a national style of painting in opposition
to a western academic style), the Pahari miniature tradition
(the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century miniature schools
of the north Indian hill country), the Chinese paintings of
Dun Huang and the paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Nilima
Sheikh currently lives and works in Baroda, India.
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Nilima Sheikh at work in
her studio |
The primed calico cloth is painted to saturation point with
casein tempera. This is made using curdled milk-glue to apply
earth and mineral powders, such as terra-verte, ochre, burnt-sienna
and mercury-vermilion. Sheikh applies this background colour
with broad horizontal brushstrokes. In order to paint detailed
imagery, the artist uses extremely thin, squirrel-hair brushes.
These curved brushes allow the artist to paint lines of varying
width.
| Other
lines to follow for Nilima Sheikh |
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Nilima
SHEIKH India b.1945
Shamiana 1996
Detail Meera 2
Casein tempera on canvas
255 x 180cm
The installation comprises six hanging scrolls of casein
tempera on canvas and a canopy of synthetic polymer paint
on canvas
Purchased 1996.
Queensland Art Gallery Foundation
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
Reproduced by permission of the artist |
Extract of a poem by the sixteenth-century bhakti
saint-poet Meera, whose writing was about the abandon of religious
passion.
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Your Highness,
Now you can't close me
with walls.
The wise are now dear to me, lost
is womanly shame, I've left
my mother's house
and the taste of dance is on my tongue.
Take
the wedding necklace, you can break
the golden bracelet
I don't want a fort or a palace
and my hair is loose
says Meera.
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In
the Dark of the Heart: Songs of Meera,
trans. S.Futehally, Indus/Harper Collins, New Delhi,
1995, p.47.
Quoted
by Kapur, Geeta, The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial
of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane,
p.100.
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