US-based artist Mekhala Bahl likes to toy with offbeat mediums, mostly textiles. She uses quilts, silk and canvases for her art works.
Bahl has been trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, after which she returned to India in 2003. Bahl works with glass, wood, silk, paper, plastic and quilting.
Her works take off on clothes and textiles. While her painted canvases have a cloth-like feel, the apparels, which are at times intimate and at times abstract, enter into her themes as well. She uses chine collé (a textile) in the adhering of fine silk on the backing surface of work, imbuing it with an ethereal quality.
A peek into her oeuvre shows a medley of styles - from block printing, etching, lithography to drawing, painting and sculpture. Her images read like journals recording daily life.
Her current body of 14 artworks, titled The Geometry of Error, which will be on display at Gallery Espace Jan 21, will include an exclusive collection of quilted works along with etchings on silk and canvas drawn from her travels and studies of everyday objects.
"The exhibition is the culmination of works created by Mekhala in the last two years. The scale ranges from small intimate images to vast canvases where she scribbles, draws and prints," Renu Modi of Gallery Espace said.
{{/usCountry}}"The exhibition is the culmination of works created by Mekhala in the last two years. The scale ranges from small intimate images to vast canvases where she scribbles, draws and prints," Renu Modi of Gallery Espace said.
{{/usCountry}}The artist says her working style depends on the distance between the marks created on the canvas, "almost like a dot game".