The Women's Work Issue Women's Work. Pen and Brush. 2019 | Page 16

pen + brush x of note
and trompeta de Angel, as a central object
and symbol. This is yet another example of
the artist’s reverence for reclaiming and
elevating the seemingly ordinary, domestic,
or dismissed offhandedly as feminine, into
the sublime. The campana flower is sacred
to Afro-Cuban religious rituals and rites
and to Orisha worship. Tied to Afro-Cuban
herbalism and medicinal uses, both its
leaf and flower are used to purify, cleanse,
and banish negativity. Campos-Pons’s use
of the campana flower, in whole and in
reassembled fragments, renders the work
quite delicate and fragile, yet, paradoxically,
its formidability is retained in the power
of its medicinal properties. Although the
campana flower is in parts, there lingers the
possibility of repair. As a representation of
women’s work, Angel’s Trumpets, Devil’s Bells
flourishes as a potent meditation on naming,
witnessing, and healing.
Suchitra Mattai
Suchitra Mattai is deeply concerned with
the artistic labor of women’s work—the skill,
craftsmanship, artistry, detail, intricacy,
and love invested in a vintage patchwork
tapestry, or a silk sari, or a crocheted lace that
transforms it from a sequence of threads into
a work of art. Mattai's personal commitment
to the slow, meditative and increasingly
elusive handmade process—weaving, knitting,
crocheting, sewing, needlepointing, and
embroidering, which have been buoyed across
generations by the hands of women—reflect
the artist’s political consciousness of the
visible and the invisible work of women. She
wants to “give voice to the original makers”—
women. 5 This reverence for women’s work can
be seen simply in the ways the artist honors
the threads, both tangible and metaphorical,
woven throughout the vintage saris in The
Sweeter Side or the crocheted fibers of Mala
or the embroidered canvases in Collages:
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Identity. With each puncture of embroidery,
each woven thread, each knitted yarn, Mattai
is challenging the ways women’s artistic
production rooted in handmade traditions
have been excluded, dismissed, trivialized, or
outright erased from art historical discourse
as “domestic” or “feminine.” Instead, the artist
elevates their value and centers them squarely
within the history of art making.
Mattai, like so many of us, is a daughter of
migration. Embedded in these works are
the histories, memories, and visual codes
of her Indian heritage. In each small collage
that make up the larger wall installation of
Collages: Identity, an Indian woman or girl
is centered as the protagonist as way for the
artist to pay homage to the multiplicity of
their lives. She often thinks of her work, for
example the formidable The Sweeter Side , a
tapestry of vintage saris enclosed in a heavy
metal frame, as a “monument” for the women
and laborers from India and its diaspora,
one that bridges women of the past with the
Indian women of her own family who ensured
the passing on of handmade traditions. In
Mattai’s work, women of the Indian diaspora
are always present.
Mattai’s migratory paths through the
Caribbean/South American region,
particularly Guyana, where she was born, then
onto to Canada, and the United States inform
a dynamic artistic practice characterized
by what the she deems “disconnected
landscapes that are unreal but offer a lingering
familiarity.” 6 While employing the processes of
women’s work to make these textile sculptures
and installations, Mattai is in conversation,
in both subtle and overt ways, about how
women navigate through and out of migration,
displacement, and borders. All three works
teem with texture, materiality, and laborious
detail as the artist weaves together a bounty
of objects suggestive of the turbulent and
disruptive experiences of migration.
To be immersed in the details of Mattai’s
work, to witness her breathe life into
seemingly unremarkable found objects—a
belt, a tassel—only to reinvent them into
monuments of beauty, is a reminder of
the words of Haitian-born writer Edwidge
Danticat who posits that all immigrants are
artists for the ways in which we fashion and
make a life from nothing. She writes:
“That experience of touching down
in a totally foreign place is like
having a blank canvas: You begin
with nothing, but stroke by stroke
you build a life. This process requires
everything great art requires—
risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of
imagination, all the qualities that are
the building blocks of art. You must
be able to dream something nearly
impossible and toil to bring it into
existence.” 7
Suchitra Mattai, The Sweeter Side, 2019, vintage saris,
belt, fiber, tassel, faux plant, metal frame, 72 x 33.75
inches. Courtesy of the artist and K Contemporary.
Women’s Work
For Suchitra Mattai, women’s work is steeped
both in the activism of the immigrant and the
poetics of an artistic practice.
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Miora Rajaonary
Miora Rajaonary, Geneviève, from the series, Lamba,
2018, archival c-print, 33 x 33 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Taking on a Herculean task is a vibrant
community of African photographers
entrenched in the work of transforming the
images of their continent. Miora Rajaonary,
the Madagascar-born photographer who
currently lives and works in Johannesburg,
South Africa, stands tall among them. In a
recent interview with The Washington Post ,
she shared, “The stories and the photos about
Africa remain the same . . . I wish I could see
a more nuanced perspective on Africa, other
than the one highlighting war, disease and
poverty because Africa is definitely more than
that.” 8
As a result, Rajaonary’s photography practice,
which spans the mediums of documentary,
conceptual, fashion, and portraiture, offers a
direct challenge to the all too familiar images
of Madagascar, known colloquially as “the
8 th continent” because of its isolated location
off the coast of East Africa. Unfortunately,
what the global public often sees of the
visual culture of Madagascar, one of the least
visited countries in Africa, still centers on the