Picasso on your sleeve

Doodle-ish Picassoheads float in clutters, swim from the human face to the wall, spread out on outlandish clothes or settle on smooth bra cups. Electrical wires bunch into armpit hair, tampon earrings dangle from paper clip hooks, and bindis freckle the face, sugar ball the lips, and period-stain the undies... Everything about Tanya Maheshwari's disjointed world, as she calls it, is "awkward".

The 21-year-old, just weeks away from graduating from the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), has exhibited at Delhi's Irregulars Art Fair 2008, modelled for Copenhagen-based Pakistani-artist Zuhra Hilal, wearing her signature gender-celebratory bodysuit of glittering vulva and has an envious Instagram fan following. In her unusual self-portraits, she often distorts her face and repurposes her grandfather's clothes and old NIFT submissions to create outfits with avant-garde silhouettes. These have gaping holes to air the 'wrong' places – butt and chest – and are doodled with strange-looking creatures that are genderless with unrecognisable, glitchy genitals. "I'm a fan of the awkward and the vague," says Maheshwari who uses her own anatomy to wear her designs, which at times focus on issues of womanhood. She attributes the roots of her disjointed symmetry to familial roots — her growing-up years cocooned in all kinds of nick-nacks collected by her art connoisseurs parents, who relocated several times and took their art along. "I remember dad paying extra for cargo of life-size giraffe and turtle sculptures when we left Uganda," recalls the artist.

From catalogues of different kinds of artwork, she'd fashion out disjointed collages... for instance, juxtaposing big eyes and small noses. It's possible to conclude that her experiments mostly involved cubist paintings, though Maheshwari is unsure about the genesis. She however recalls a chance comment by a friend during a politically intense discussion, when he blurted out, "How do you know about this? I thought you went to NIFT..." made her realise that he assumed that a career in fashion meant she was alienated from current affairs. In time, Maheshwari realised that clothing can act as a medium to say many things. "I was looking for something wackier before I gave drawing a chance, and clothing, I felt, brought in a valuable change. Here [at NIFT], I understood how clothes react to your body," she explains.

Maheshwari's garments reiterate her own trysts with her body, as gauged in her early 2017 zine titled, BOD in a series of "awkward" iPhone self-portraits of unpleasant memories. "There was this stupid boy in school who told me it didn't look like I needed to wear a bra. So I forced mom to buy me a few from La Senza that emphasised my breasts. When I look back now and try to think of why I wore it, I think that my sense of self was dictated by ingrained patriarchy. " In time she learnt to hit back. Wearing a tampon as earrings had a troll call her autistic. "I didn't let that pass." She retaliated with data on heavy taxation of period products, women still using cloth, being tabooed, and the likes of poet Rupi Kaur being period-shamed. Another troll rebuked, "You seem to have a brain, but if you think wearing all of this on your face makes you cool, you are so wrong." Such comments, she says, are eclipsed by a ton of 'super encouraging DMs' that appreciate her brand of portraiture and fashion sense, and even prod her to start her own range. "I want to get into the wearable-art space. I want my clothes to be a visceral experience for the wearer," says Maheshwari, who can't wait to graduate.