My teaching in Bangalore at the CKP painting department was a lovely interlude of four days, with thirteen young people who are all at exciting thresholds of their lives and learning that the key to their freedom is really in their own hands. The optimism with which I approach teaching is a strategy that obliges me to contribute my energies and apply myself to insisting that every student I ever engage with, must believe in themselves. In this lies the potential of a bigger dream which is what it is all about eventually.
Whilst in Bangalore I caught the 25th anniversary show of Sakshi Gallery. This show was a representation of all their main Indian artists and the works on the walls were like old friends gathered together in celebration! My own journey with Sakshi Gallery is twenty years old, and till date it is a precious and special relationship that holds mutual respect, and common agendas and values; which is the real bond within this unique affiliation we have all these years.
I returned to Baroda to a waiting and not sleeping tiger! A project conceived by ARTIGER that invites artists to work on a sculpted fibre glass tiger, these works of art will then be on view in different public locations all over India for four months. These art works will then be auctioned and the entire proceeds will go to the campaign of saving our Indian tiger. So presently a rather majestic seated tiger gazes at all who enter my studio, and the process of transformation through my intervention, is hopefully the magic in the making! Simultaneous to this, 52 ceramic hearts that I have conceived are being fired and glazed in the Ceramic Centre located in the Gorva industrial estate of Baroda. I have the most dedicated facilitators for this ceramic project, who quite literally have put their own lives on hold, to hold my heart in their hands! The joy of these two projects is that it allows me to wander into spaces of thinking through new devices of deliverance, which for those who know me, is something I delight and revel in.
I also recently delivered a lecture Women Artists of India : Voices of Strength at the Women's Study Centre in the Faculty of Family and Community Sciences. A small room packed with an attentive audience made the effort of finding those extra hours in my schedule to honour this commitment, truly worth while. I am presently working on a short presentation for a forum at CEPT in Ahmadabad where I have been invited to talk about the process of an work from it's inception to its place within a public domain. So once again I am connected to a deadline that is looming rather ominously at me!
Yesterday was daughters day! My spiritual daughters fill my space with the radiance of their energy and empowerment all the year round, and my adopted grand-daughter Aditi becomes more special each day that she grows. One of my spiritual daughters came to my studio with a bunch of ivory white roses at dusk and said " I just wanted to give this to you". Whilst watching each of them unobserved as they live in the collective we have in our home, I know the power of nurtured energies and the benefit of optimism as a gift to another.
