Chandrika Marla: Textile Dance of Relationships

The Urge to Merge, acrylic and fabric on canvas, 2011 

Migrating to a new land and finding herself at a crucial crossroads in her life led to Chicago-based artist of Indian origin, Chandrika Marla to transition into the art world six years ago. A graduate of the distinguished Indian fashion school, National Institute of Fashion and Technology (NIFT), she was a former fashion designer for a Delhi export company. “I moved to States in 1998 when I got married and subsequently, began designing clothes for Disney,” Chandrika says. While she enjoyed the experience, she mentions that having to leave Disney actually proved to be a blessing in disguise.

Having sporadically painted before, she utilized the time to hone her own painting technique under the tutelage of a local French artist. Eventually, she decided to embrace art, leaving fashion behind. “Fashion and art was getting muddled up in my head...in fashion, one is always designing for the consumer and validation is based upon if a collection sold well,” she says, remarking that becoming an artist allowed her to experience a great surge of liberation and creativity.

Excluded, acrylic and oil pastel, 2009

Having been immersed in fashion for so long, Chandrika's hand would instinctively move to the familiar rhythms of sketching the female body. “I don't have a pronounced sense of realism, I am more interested in delineating humanistic figures,” she says, mentioning that the figures populating her paintings nowadays are increasingly becoming more and more anthropomorphic over time, vague and blurred in contrast to her earlier works depicting sharply defined figures.

Chandrika's art produces several questions about being an immigrant/artist, especially in context to personal preoccupations of creating and writing about one's homeland while living away from it. For an immigrant artist, how much does their motherland  influence their work (in Chandrika's case, India)? Is she intent on presenting herself as an essentially Indian artist through the basis of her work or do her roots play only a subliminal role in shaping it? Overall, is it imperative that one's immigrant identity always define one's artistic work?

Summer Fragment, acrylic, oil-pastel, and pigment on canvas, 2013

Both as a relic of her previous fashion designer avatar as well as a signature trademark, Chandrika incorporates fabric as an additional layer in her pieces to create a palimpsest of preexisting acrylics, oils, and pastels. In Sudha, for example, she cuts up a table-cloth and places it on the painting as how one would sew the pieces together, explaining, “It was like jigsawing a puzzle together.”

As India possesses incredible textile wealth, Chandrika has vast choices to feature in her work. (One example is Rajasthani block-print.) She explores fabric as means to interrogate the role of clothes in the facades that one presents to the world. In Urge to Merge (pictured first), three fabric bodices dance in a dialogue of sorts against a backdrop of warm, meditative red. Chandrika's works essentially concern themselves with the politics of relationships between women and the fabric, with paint converging to convey the layers nested inside these relationships.

Fashioning Women’s Development

Editor's Note: Lisa Wong is a traditional and impact investment professional at Nikko Asset Management and co-runs the UK Chapter of the international Women Advancing Microfinance (WAM) network based out of London. Her specialties include female empowerment, inclusive business, microfinance, and green investment. An avid writer and reader, she is currently working on a creative project on the intersection between the written word and visual culture in her spare time. She holds an English MA from the University of Cambridge and Dual Degree Master of Public Administration in Public Policy and Economics from the London School of Economics and Columbia University. 

Women and fashion have a longstanding and complex relationship: often a source of joy as well as contempt. Recently, in the sleek surroundings of a London Soho art gallery, Rook and Raven, two leading female sustainable fashion experts exposed some ugly truths about fashion, and the visionary efforts underway to revolutionize the industry as part of the Women Advancing Microfinance UK speaker series.

Dr. Pamela Ravasio, winner of UK “Green Oscar,” the Observer Ethical Award, and textile supply chain expert, ranked the fashion industry as the second worst in the world in environmental and social abuse – right after agriculture. Behind the basic white tee and the darling dress, there are often stories of child labour, chemical poisoning, slavery and textile waste – to name but a few ills. Most fashion savvy consumers and creators are not purposefully inflicting such terrors on the world, Ravasio argues, but in a veil of unknowing many are ignorantly or blindly allowing a network of harm to propagate in the service of style.

When one is confronted with a t-shirt; and 2.4 billion are produced a year; one often has no idea who made it and under what conditions. A traditional conception of fashion sees that impact is measured by aesthetics and functionality, which focuses on the design level. Often designers have never been in a cotton field or a dye factory – they have no concept of the wider impact of their design decisions, or any relation to the effects they are causing. A fashion supply and distribution chain is often so fragmented that the full story of an item of clothing, from how the crop was grown, the labour conditions in which it was made to how the waste products are disposed of are rarely fully known. The button may be from Taiwan, the cotton from China, the worker from Bangladesh – the assembly line is often global and multi-partied. Ravasio revealed that 25% of the world’s pesticides are used in relation to the fashion industry – how many fashion insiders and consumers even consider this factor when faced with a new item of clothing?

Feminism and Fashion: The Man Repeller

From Man Repeller / image via 5inchandup

Like many women, I love fashion. I'm fortunate enough to be able to buy new things and live in a country where I can freely choose what I want to wear. Blogger Leandra Medine is celebrating that freedom, too, and is using it to start a new and subversive fashion philosophy: wearing what she wants, regardless of whether men find it appealing.

Medine, who was profiled here in the New York Times, runs the aptly-named blog Man Repeller. She's described as celebrating:

"...fashions that, though promoted by designers and adored by women, most likely confuse — or worse, repulse — the average straight man. These include turbans, harem pants, jewelry that looks like a torture instrument, jumpsuits, ponchos, furry garments resembling large unidentified animals, boyfriend jeans, clogs and formal sweatpants."

While I can't say I own a pair of formal sweatpants (sacrilege!), I can absolutely get behind the idea of dismissing any thought of men from the ladies' dressing room. Clothes are powerful. A good outfit can make you feel confident and strong; an unexpected tear in your dress or spill on a sweater can leave you feeling helpless or vulnerable. Why hand that power over to men? It may be an urban myth that early feminists burned their bras, but the concept behind that myth is still right on--women should have complete autonomy over their bodies, right down to their underwear.