Exploring the naked truth

The first time I saw Vidha Saumya’s work was in November 2011 at the Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai. ‘Love Charades’ was a collation of large ladies rollicking, laughing uproariously all the while. It was charming, liberating and thought-provoking. And it made me a fan of the artist’s ideas and execution, dubbed by art writer Nancy Adajania as the ‘volumetrics of exaggeration’. Now there is much more to be charmed by, with Vidha’s deft pen-strokes exploring various other bodies as well, leading to a series of drawings in a book called Gunpowder. She is quickly inspired, she insists: “Drawing is inextricably tied to living. The subjects often meander around what I am struck by at the moment.” This happens whether she uses paper or clay to give her ideas form. “The idea of drawing, the gesture of drawing is important to me. It gives me a channel for expression.”

Everything is grist to her creative mill, “Experiences, films, reading, music and observations go into the vocabulary of image-making. I cull out bodies and their activities from this bank.”

It all began at art school, an “atelier-like” institution Vidha attended. One exercise was to draw large bodies, starting from theory or copying replicas of Greco-Roman sculptures. After four years of doing this, “one practically stops observing what a body is actually like”. Then came the challenge of making the bodies do something. It was almost an evolution: first they stood in the middle of the stage set by the sheet of paper, being watched and admired by younger men; then they became stage divas performing, “which I did on purpose so that they lose their inhibitions. Next I made them into pole dancers to fully explore the pliability of their bodies.” As Vidha prepared for ‘Love Charades’, “the women had come into their own. They were confident, performative, aware of the viewer’s gaze and unabashedly disregarded the presence of anyone else... These were women who had undergone age, worldly experiences, childbirth and body issues.” And then she decided she had to let go of them. There was much more that she needed to explore.

Vidha considered men as subjects for her pen, of course. They would not be easy to draw; first she needed to figure them out, to understand how to look at them. “Do we look at them as objects, as figures to fear, do we look at them at all?” In that introspective process, she looked wider, further, and found that it was not merely a man/woman identity divide, but that there was so much else in-between. “I started enjoying the ambiguity of the androgynous body.” This segued neatly into Explosives (2009), a book of drawings inspired by a newspaper Q&A column written by sex therapist Dr Mahinder Watsa. The black-ballpoint images showed people in various stages of undress — men in fancy underwear and women in bras, sometimes looking at the viewer, always directly, each involved with their own selves. A new in-progress book called Gunpowder, with seven large drawings being part of her show, ‘Messes of the Afternoon’ — a short film she made to be included in ‘Body as Site’…there is so much to the lady who makes me smile with her work.

Most of that work centres around sex and sexuality. There are women cavorting in skimpy lace undies, men and women feeding each other almost lasciviously, bodies twined in whatever degree of intimacy a viewer wants to give them and always that sense of fun, a joke untold but shared. The artist never hesitates to delineate physical fervour, undaunted by possible reactions from the moral brigade. That her work is about sex may be what people see at first, but the open-minded will go beyond, to see the humour and humanity within. “I am not making work to shock, but to dislodge certain notions of what should be. The drawings contain sexual tension, just like it is inherently there in situations around us.”

Vidha is now a Mumbai girl, her journeying taking her from Basantpur in Bihar to New Delhi, Bangalore, Lahore and parts beyond. Her family is artistic — her mother is multitalented artist-dramatist Vibha Rani, her father is a noted film journalist and her husband, Ali Akbar Mehta, himself the grandson of a well-known artist, explores the leap between traditional painting and digital art. But Vidha does look at life besides her work, albeit with the same enquiring, analytical eye. “I completely immerse myself in the process of food-making, eating and feeding.” While it is not an all-consuming passion, it is an interest. “I have to take charge and know what I am consuming and try and make it better if it already is not. Studying the behaviour of plants, re-planting from kitchen leftovers, observing the subtle changes in a growing plant is intrinsic to my up-bringing.” This to her is not very “different from the process of making drawings”, but also “satisfying everyday activities”.

Vidha’s time in an independent study programme at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore was, for her, inspiring, especially the interactions with artists. “The complete unapologetic and transparent self-reflection is something one must learn from Pakistani artists — not just ‘visual artists’, but also those in theatre, television and documentary filmmaking.” The year of study and three exhibitions in the city gave her impetus; it “updated me – it gave me a language and a strong will to move forward in the direction I was just beginning to understand.” And her tryst with nakedness was not a trouble-maker for her in a nation that is ultra-conservative. “I did approach an art gallery to show a series titled ‘Purdah’, drawings of nude women in a burkha.” Her first show was in Lahore in 2008 and since then, her work has garnered applause wherever she shows.

And collaboration with the man, the artist she married? It has happened with two projects and more is a given. “We sometimes feel that our ability to talk about art is inexhaustive. We abhor small talk and try and avoid it at all cost, which often leaves us only with each other to talk to.” While they do travel in different directions in their work, when one is busy with a project, the “other naturally becomes part of the process as a silent collaborator”.