Govt. Fine Arts college students come together to create products for a cause

The effort of the students is aimed at a crowdfunding project to support the younger sister of a student in the college who is facing a severe medical condition requiring expensive treatment

The popular image of an artist is that of a loner, working cooped up inside a room, in blissful isolation from the rest of the world. The Government College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, is now witnessing a reversal of that image, with the coming together of students practising disparate art forms and bringing to the table a confluence of ideas. All of that is aimed at a crowdfunding project to support the younger sister of a student here, who is facing a severe medical condition requiring expensive treatment.

The collective, involving faculty and students from all the departments such as painting, sculpture, and applied art, has chosen a Tamil name for itself—Sakavalvu (co-existence in Tamil). Over the past few weeks, they have created a whole bunch of products, drawing on their learnings at the college, and put them up for sale in the Sakavalvu Instagram page started for the purpose.

The products on display include terracotta office utilities, eco-printed pinafore and caftan, tote bags with printed woodcut artworks, cyanotype prints and bookmarks, bamboo pens, art prints, pendants and stickers, all of it created within the campus, with the material they use in their studies. Soon, they will be available in a physical stall within the college campus too.

“Usually, such fundraising for such causes are done as direct collection of funds for a cause through online portals. But, the student’s family was not very keen on it. Then, we hit upon the idea of this collective effort through art. These are designs and art works which are evolving as part of the process of working for a cause,” says Naquash, faculty of sculpture at the college, who is anchoring the initiative with applied art faculty Sumeesh Chempoor, and painting faculty V. Akhiljith.

The crowdfunding project is a starting point of a larger initiative aimed at utilising their artistic talents to serve and benefit the community. The plans include design or redesign which can help a community, public art initiatives and design interventions that can counter unscientific design practices.

The Sakavalvu collective is drawing strength from the history of the college, which has a unique place in Indian art history as the origin point of a short-lived radical arts movement that still produces reverberations once in a while. Fuelled by post-Emergency political fervour, a group of students led by K.P. Krishnakumar from the college set out to produce a proletarian art movement that eschewed the existing visual styles. Living with the fishing families for weeks and teaching them art through slide shows and then by making them the subject of their works in various mediums, the group opened new avenues in people’s art.