Projects

Life-size playful public artworks created for Jaipur Art Week 2025 at 3 locations across the city of Jaipur: Albert Hall Museum, Patrika Gate & Museum of Meenakari Heritage which then traveled to Jal Mahal before finding a final home in the educational institutions of Pearl Academy Jaipur, Indian Institute of Craft and Design and Alliance Francaise Jaipur.

The large scale installations aimed to highlight the generosity and collectivism in the vernacular architecture of rural Rajasthan through evoked fragments of ancestral homes and stories spanning generations. Today, a fast disappearing kind of architecture, it was important for us to make the artworks tactile to evoke the nostalgia of vernacular building practices, and consequently, the social connections that held us together just like lime plaster. The striking blue is a departure from traditional colors, inspired by the indigo of block printing, another fast disappearing traditional practice, to create a deliberate dissonance from otherwise familiar spaces - a provocation to remind us that we must not forget the lessons of yesterday while laying the foundations of tomorrow.

Concept note:

The three fragments of the installation Seeds of Yesterday/ Tomorrow are lessons of the past, evoking the invisible whole of ancestral homes that lie locked away in villages as the families have all but moved to the cities. Of the farm holdings that have fragmented into smaller plots divided between brothers. Of the double locks on doors that tell stories of how home turned into property, of women’s right to inherit on paper but not in practice, of wills left unwritten. Remnants of an eroding architecture which made us generous to each other and sensitive to the environment over generations but today appearing as relics in the contemporary city.

The installations have been drawn from the vernacular architecture of Rajasthan that form its thresholds, the moments of encounter, the spaces of interaction. Here they create a public place for conversations and reflection on the interconnectedness between architecture, sustainability and social fabric. They aim to highlight the sensitivity, generosity and collectivism in the vernacular architecture of rural Rajasthan in the hope that current urbanization does not forget these inherent lessons set in stone and lime, and to remind us that foundations of tomorrow are sown in the seeds of yesterday.