Image Credit - Shivani Aggarwal
Delhi-born Shivani Aggarwal completed her Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) from College of Art, New Delhi in 1996 and her MA (Cert.) painting from Wimbledon School of Art, London, UK in 2003 supported by the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship.
Aggarwal's work involves everyday objects that she creates, enlarges, bends and twists. So, there are three-dimensional installations in wood, terracotta, fiberglass and thread.Toying with everyday objects around her, Aggarwal's work elevates these several notches exploring gender-related and basic human issues. She connects these issues to the society that we live in showcasing the responses that arise from these. Art for her, as she put it rather forthrightly, “is an emotional presentiment to our inner and outer situation, locating it amidst several socio-cultural and political contexts. My work has developed from small intimate and intricate paintings to large three-dimensional sculptural installations in wood, terracotta, fiberglass, wire and thread. The thread has been explored in various ways - sewing, crocheting, stitching, painting and also using them in installations for the past 15 years”.Aggarwal's work delves deeply in women - often questioning the jejune and repetitive feminine responsibilities of beautification, providing love, repairing both objects and relations, and much more that we often pretend to overlook. Out spring the feelings of emptiness that women in families feel in the works of art. Incidentally, these feelings are more often than not due to the unsaid expectations that a feminine soul feels.Aggarwal's use of the thread speaks volumes: it can be a social link between relations as well as conflicts, and at other times becomes a blood vessel. These threads create patterns or as she put it, these are “shocking and compelling, twisting and turning, infinitely into a cycle of decay and repair. "I often employ the images of sewing, knitting, using the related tools in my work to emphasize connotations with warmth, home, protection and childhood, and also to revisit and reexamine the cultural preconceptions surrounding it”.
Aggarwal also uses everyday objects as focal points of challenge and inquiry. The tools are bent out of shape and made completely useless. For example, the scissors can no longer cut the entangled threads while the hammer is twisted and cannot be used to beat anything to shape. These, according to her, symbolise the idea of the self as a tool that moulds and remoulds itself to counter the inner and outer challenges that it faces. At the same time, these disfigured instruments become symbols of pathos and humor. “As symbols of functionality, from personal, political or societal standpoints, they remain constantly challenged, twisted, distorted, broken or perverted for convenience and greed,” says Aggarwal. At the India Art Fair, Shivani Aggarwal's 'Within Confines' shows a novel way of looking at emptiness. Working during the pandemic, the artist has a wide range of creations: from outlines on paper to heavy wooden sculptures and intricate copper-wire yarns, each hand-crocheted by the artist.