Perspective is what matters. A scientist sees elements and an artist sees the aesthetical combination of those elements. However, there are no hard and fast rules that they should restrict themselves within their perspectives. The interchanging positions and the meeting point of talents make all the difference. In that very special alchemy beauty happens! B Jaya Lakshmi is a scientist turned artist; one cannot say that she has changed her perspective about science or art, but she has found a beautiful balance. Hailing from a family where science played an intellectual backdrop of her growth, Jaya Lakshmi couldn’t have gone for art directly. She became a science educator with a bend of art. It was like educating the students like an artist did and in turn she created many art students with a scientific bend of mind. In a time when logic and science are the last thing in the minds of the brute majority, to have artists like Jaya Lakshmi getting stronger by day is a solace, not only for the artist community but for the society in general.
Johny ML
Jaya Lakshmi is an artist with a difference; and the difference lies in the choice of her materials. She uses wax as her medium and in art history it is known as ‘encaustic art’. We have seen wax being used by artists to make statues and dolls mainly to enthuse the tourists, to give life like finish to the representational human images and also to make eye-fooling art. Jaya Lakshmi does not belong to that tribe that uses this medium to entertain. She makes serious engagement with the medium, which has a history traced back to the ancient Greeks. When oil on canvas became the trend of the modern times, encaustic art had taken a backseat for some time. It staged a coming back when artists with interest in using various ancient and modern materials for their experimental works, upsetting the conventional techniques. Jaya Lakshmi got interested in the medium when she was introduced to it by an American artist-friend, a couple of decades ago and it was a love at first sight for her.
Jaya Lakshmi is proud of being called an ‘encaustic artist’. For the beginners, encaustic is an art making process where bee wax mixed with pigments, is used as the basic medium and blow torch as the tool. Wax could be employed on any surface including canvas, boards, clay tiles, paper or any other surface. The word ‘wax’ brings to mind the idea of temporary solidity and brittleness. It is something that melts at the presence of heat. Metaphorically speaking, there exists a love-hate relationship between the two. But when the opposites are brought into a field of conditions, and if the binary participants are ready to oblige each other, they offer and display permanency, defying the commonsensical understanding of the binaries that never agree. Pigmented wax and the blow torch, when brought in with binding conditions, with adequate resins to seal the deal, do wonders as we see in the works of Jaya Lakshmi. Those who want to look into the case of durability, they should go back to the sepulchral portraits from Greece and Egypt in the early days of the Common Era.
It is not just the love for the materials that has led Jaya Lakshmi into art. A nature lover with an eye for details that sees the micro world in its true variety, Jaya Lakshmi makes her works resonate with the natural world. A keen observer of her oeuvre so far, could see how she revisits the form and texture of the barks of the trees and recreates them in her works. Mimicking the nature is said to be the ideal form of art, though the very idea of ‘ideal’ itself has been thwarted in different times differently. Jaya Lakshmi’s ‘idea’ or ‘ideal’ is not just about mimicking nature but paying tribute to the great nature that holds various species of life exactly the way a mother holds her children. A ‘warm’ relationship is established between the process and image, resulting into a series of works that only a science enthusiast could see on a daily basis while looking around intently or causally. In this way, Jaya Lakshmi’s works are also an invitation to look at her works intently in order to open doors of micro perceptions.
Another interesting aspect of Jaya Lakshmi’s works is her keen interest in the underwater life. As an artist who likes to undertake trips to various scenic locations in the world, Jaya Lakshmi’s encounter with the underwater world during one such trip abroad was an eye opener. The various life forms that she saw there triggered certain thought processes in her, helping her draw affinities with the encaustic works that she had been doing. With an added focus she took up creating works that could evoke the feelings that she had experienced while meeting the oceanic creatures. Though, these are the inspirations, Jaya Lakshmi does not like to ‘illustrate’ what she has seen or felt. For her art is more than the explication of the ideas. She likes her works to be experiential for the viewers. They are to be seen not as representational forms but as art objects with certain aesthetically modulated physicality, imparting an object sense primarily and later an inner exploration for what lies beyond the object-presence.
Artists generally use representational modes for conveying the idea, displaying the skills and also to invite the viewers for sharing the common aesthetical space as occupied by the artists themselves. It is a sort of holy communion. Jaya Lakshmi also uses certain representational devices in her works as she brings in landscape like fields, highly defined and textured. Having developed a high level of dexterity with the encaustic techniques, Jaya Lakshmi likes to play around with textures in her works. They erupt like waves, growths, tendrils, shoots and flakes, besides they also come up like tangible sensations like goosebumps and touch. They invite touch, especially in a world where touch is an ambivalent gesture, after the pandemic years. According to Jaya Lakshmi, her works’ ability to invite touch, and the throbbing tactility of their surfaces are the peculiarity of the medium; its apparent malleability, softness and allure. At the same time, she, with a smile adds that they are ‘visual traps.’ One cannot just escape without negotiating the ‘itch to touch’.
With the aforementioned dexterity, Jaya Lakshmi experiments with various shapes and formations. There is a series of small ‘encaustic drawings’ where she has brought in the image of exploding pods, which she calls the ‘dissemination of ideas’ through the image of natural seed dispensers. In a series of small drawings, she experiments with textural layering to evoke the feeling of ‘inlays’ and ‘embedded-ness’ where one could see the inner layers suspended between the base and the outer layer, creating virtual spatial dimensions within the works. Another series has geometrical suggestions, rather like notations of a sun-dial, architectural and constructive, with surfaces flatter than the other works, bringing forth a sense of abstraction and definition alike. Besides the three -dimensional works, a sort of low-relief paintings, Jaya Lakshmi also does sculptural forms with the same textural varieties, giving a new direction to her artistic thought process. Jaya Lakshmi’s oeuvre as a whole does not limit itself to one kind of work, but an ensemble of explorations, stretching of boundaries, pertaining to the possibilities of the encaustic medium.
‘Taru Mitra’ was the environmental group that Jaya Lakshmi had headed while she was a science teacher. The pronounced environmental affinities in her works come from her constant engagement with nature and its issues. However, sloganeering for nature is not her forte, rather subtlety is what rules her works. The works in this exhibition remain ‘Untitled’ because any title, fancy or matter of fact, could lead the viewers only to the ‘authorial intent’, the artist believes. Curatorially speaking, Jaya Lakshmi’s works move from their ‘object sense’ to ‘textual sense’ where multiple meanings are derived by the viewers through their creative engagement with the works of art.
