Stella Maris Fine Arts alumni present concept-driven show in Chennai

Join 20 Stella Maris College alumni at Lalit Kala Akademi for an exhibition exploring the ocean's mystique and time's fragility.

The gallery at Chennai’s Lalit Kala Akademi hums like an unruly classroom at 11am. Voices overlapping, footsteps echoing, instructions cutting through the air. The environment feels apt since the space is currently hosting The Art of Becoming: Stella(r) Alumni Canvas, a coming-together of 20 artists shaped by the Department of Fine Arts at Stella Maris College.

Some are adding final touches to their installations, making sure the sculptures are sitting right, writing notes and instructions on how to view the works best.  At the centre of it all is curator Ashrafi S Bhagat, once their professor, now an art historian and critic, moving from work to work with a measured eye. The classroom may be decades behind them, but the discipline remains.

“I conceived this exhibition around two interconnected ideas — the mystique of the ocean and the fragility of time and space,” says Ashrafi. “Both are powerful, enigmatic, and ever-changing. Nothing stands still. If you look at fragility of time and space, for me it is memory; time plus the space it occupies in your mind. And that same fragility exists in the ocean’s ecosphere. It is weathered, altered, sometimes consciously degraded. Both are aspects of life that are constantly in flux.” 

The result is not thematic uniformity, but divergence within a shared framework. Some artists have immersed themselves in both concepts; others have anchored themselves firmly in one.

For Thejomaye Menon, also one of the organisers of the exhibition, the ocean becomes energy in motion. Long associated with a personalised figurative language, she has consciously stepped into abstraction to explore force rather than form. In this series, currents surge across the canvas in layered chromatic fields, circular movements echoing both tidal rhythm and planetary orbit. “I’ve worked on the depth below the sea and connected it to the universe. When we speak of the fragility of time, I feel it is determined by planetary change. The planets influence movement. We may not fully understand it, but time shifts with these forces. It’s a mystery,” she says. 

“Each of these paintings took about three months,” says Preetha Kannan, standing before a canvas layered in dots of blues and greens. To understand the intricate details in each painting, she presents the viewer with a magnifying glass. Having stepped away from painting to pursue volunteer work in Chennai and later with Baba Amte in rural India for environmental and social causes, Preetha returned to art with sharpened environmental urgency.