Suchitra Mattai’s multidisciplinary work explores how memory, myth, and oral traditions can be harnessed to unravel received narratives rooted in patriarchal and colonialist systems. By re-imagining the past, she opens up the future. Drawing on Indian miniature painting, European tapestry, and craft-based practices like embroidery and weaving, the Indo-Caribbean artist postulates a “future space” of alternative mythologies that celebrate and monumentalize the experiences and labor of brown women. Within this space, standard binaries—between old and new, East and West, history and mythology, labor and leisure—can be placed in conversation, questioned and reconfigured. As materially and visually rich as they are conceptually complex, Mattai’s wrapped, braided, stitched, and woven works, many made from transformed vintage saris and incorporating found objects, serve as allegories for universal and personal narratives that empower forgotten stories while imagining new possibilities.
Read more here: https://sculpturemagazine.art/new-mythologies-a-conversation-with-suchitra-mattai/