Artist Lakshmi Madhavan works with weavers in Balaramapuram to explore socio-political aspects of cloth and body

Lakshmi Madhavan explores identity, heritage through kasavu cloth, bridging art and tradition through weavers

For conceptual artist Lakshmi Madhavan, the gossamer fine cotton cloth woven with gold zari (kasavu) is her chosen medium to explore a people’s stories, culture and social mooring. The Mumbai-based artist uses the kasavu-bordered cotton textile to explore her identity, her roots and her efforts to bridge the different facets of her life while juxtaposing her quest with the lives of the weavers.

For the last five years, Lakshmi has been closely working with weavers in Balaramapuram, 19 kilometres from Thiruvananthapuram. The endeavour merges a personal quest with her artistic inspirations, “delving into the intersectionality of material, socio-cultural structures and gender codes,” says Lakshmi.

Her select works, Laboured Landscapes, were part of a group show, Three Steps of Land, at Los Angeles in the US. Curated by Rajiv Menon, the exhibition focussed on upcoming artists’ depicting Kerala or their idea of Kerala in different media.

Lakshmi explains that although many artists have their roots in Kerala, they grew up outside the State. She says, “Like me, many of them are searching for an identity, for the ties that bind and separate us from our parents and grandparents.”

Her statement on her art says that her attempt has been to “reimagine the boundaries between art and craft, high and low art, domestic and public realms, feminine and masculine impulses and, instead, focus on the depth and the nuances of a complex, expressive practice,”

Lakshmi found her medium when she wanted to pay homage to her paternal grandmother who passed away in 2021. With the help of the cotton and silk threads of the kasavu cloth, she travelled back in time to study the history and heritage of the cloth. “It was for the show Lokame Tharavadu, curated by Krishnamachari Bose, that I designed six panels with letters of the Malayalam alphabet and words that, in some way, connected my grandmother and me.”

The pristine cotton kasavu mundum-neriyathum symbolised her grandmother who only wore those. “Widowed early in life, she was always dressed in gold and white. It was not really by choice. Going by the social norms of those times, she could not wear bright colours, the karas and kasavus could not be very broad and so on.” Growing up around her, Lakshmi gradually realised that there is a “complex relationship between body and cloth. That is where my journey began.”