How this golden fibre won over Pune artists

Between June 11 and 25, a first–ever exhibition entirely on jute will be held at National Crafts Museum and Hastkala Academy in Delhi, featuring 30 artists from across India. Oak is among the five from Pune who will be at the show. The others are Raju Sutar, Vikram Marathe, Shraddha Barde and Manasa Priya.

“I decided to create a work that contrasted the texture of jute with that of silk. The colours are very bright. In the process of human evolution, our understanding of everything is going to the next level every passing day. We have processed many things, from raw to an extreme level of refinement. My latest art work explores the thought of ‘raw to refined’ through the medium of textile,” says Oak.

Jute, known as the golden fibre, has a 5,000-year history in the Indian subcontinent, with the earliest instance of production of the plant fibre dating back to 3000 BC. However, it is very possible that jute was being cultivated for fibre even by natives of the Indus Valley Civilisation and earlier societies.

Although jute is a natural fibre with insulation properties, low-thermal conductivity, absorbs water easily and dries quickly, it has never set artistic imagination on fire. That is a space that the exhibition, curated by Manjiri Thakoor, who is the adjunct lecturer of History of Art at Sir JJ School of Art, and former deputy curator of the National Gallery of Modern Art, is attempting to fill.

“It was during the pandemic that I pondered over why we were suffering and what could be done to bring nature back into our lifestyles.

I began to see a lot of jute hanging all over and began to wonder about this particular material. I began reading about jute and discovered many extraordinary aspects to it,” says Thakoor.

However, it was, at times, an uphill task to convince artists.

Barde, who creates clothes and home decor wherein the texture, shape and colour come from leaves, barks and twigs, a process called eco-printing that does not use chemical or synthetic dye for her boot-strapped company, Leafage, was sure that she could not do it.

“Manjiri asked me to take time on it and that’s how I started thinking about jute. I decided to challenge myself by eco-printing on jute and then took it further by even making a portrait,” says Barde.

Her experiments led her to using eucalyptus barks to print on the jute which has a strong colour of its own. Since then, Barde has created a portrait of a sadhu, whose dreadlocks were made of jute and a Rajasthani man wearing a safa made of jute.

For the current exhibition, she has created an image of the stump of a tree trunk on a big fabric using jute and eucalyptus print. Another work is a Ganesha idol made of jute that looks as if it is carved in stone.

“I am really in love with jute now,” she says.