fftc:FWD Artist Spotlight
Indrani Nayar-Gall
“Early Childhood” Folio Cover Art
About The Artist
Artist / Company
Indrani Nayar-Gall
– Yes She Rises, LLC
BIOGRAPHY
A multidisciplinary feminist artist, Indrani Nayar-Gall weaves global narratives of marginalization, patriarchy, and misogyny through artivist practice at the intersection of installation, 2-D/3-D media, moving image and community engagement.
Social justice themes stem from her experience growing up in India as a child of mixed north-south Indian backgrounds, and her life in the Caribbean and the U.S. with her inter-racial family. Nayar-Gall’s non-conformist work is inspired by being surrounded by women-made culture/ritual and mark-making, evoking women’s bodies as sites of violence, dreams and aspirations.
Combining materials-words-color evocative of the concept, she stretches the limits of conventional processes to create bodies that hang, stretch over floors or walls, or create non-linear digital moving image narratives. Guiding herself intuitively, she imagines solutions or reinterprets concepts, appropriates material to alter or disassociate the real/obvious to create visceral, tactile or surreal experiences.
Indrani has an MFA in experimental printmaking from Visva Bharati University India and a Graduate Certificate in Contemporary Non-Toxic Printmaking from Rochester Institute of Technology.
She has received numerous awards and exhibits regionally, nationally and internationally. Her works are in important public and private art collections including The National Art Collection of Barbados.
Cover Art for “Early Childhood” → Visit The Folio
"Into Yellows and Purples”
Artist Statement
How do we achieve gender equality in a world where girls/women are still struggling for bodily autonomy and agency? Or move beyond gender stereotypes if societies continue to conform to these constructions through color-coded merchandise, including gender specific toys/clothing/role-plays in early childhood education that puts children in boxes limiting their creativity and freedom!
My work, Into Yellows and Purples, questions these conventions by examining excerpts from Robert Southey’s poem What the world is made of, and the letters exchanged between Southey and Charlotte Brontë regarding women’s right to write and publish as the epitome of gender coding prompting me to make gender and color-coding the pivot of my approach to this project. Images of children set in streams of yellow-purples, blue-pink constraints, and brown clouds, are positioned as counterforces to each other.
The yellow-purple clouds moving diagonally upward, holds within its form and its gender-neutral colors, two free-moving children; whereas the brown clouds moving downward contain a boy and girl dressed in 19th century men and women’s clothing, boxed consecutively within a blue and a pink/washed-red confinement. The verses from Southey’s poem, “… boys are made of snips and snails, and puppy-dogs tails … girls are made of sugar and spice, and all things nice…,” layered with his letter to Brontë, flow downward with the brown clouds. Brontë’s response and my words countering Southey’s, flow upward with the code-free children.