What happens when we recognise women’s art as creative labour? How do women artists understand their relationship to their art as work and what can we learn from this? What avenues open up when women’s art is brought outside the home and community, and into the book form?
To explore these concerns, here is a set of four specially-selected titles featuring work by women artists from different folk and indigenous communities. While the perspectives and illustration styles in these books are varied, each of them grapples with the relationship between life, labour and art. Through this work, artists find the space for reflection, a break from the mundane, survival in difficult times, and an entryway to imagining wholly unfamiliar worlds.
This book of richly detailed drawings follows the journey of a migrant worker-turned-artist who continues to paint her way through difficult times. Teju’s self-taught style of lines and dots has been riso-printed using organic soy-based inks.
The moving story of a domestic helper from a community of fisherfolk who discovered painting while working in an artist’s house. She learned by doing, and has since been acknowledged as a reputed Mithila artist.
A reflective account of a young woman’s thoughts and feelings as she comes into contact with the larger world, rendered with illustrations in the Mithila style of art that tread the fine balance between tradition and innovation.
An artist from the Gond tribe of central India, brilliantly interprets Rokheya Hossain’s startling feminist fable from the early twentieth century, adding a new layer of meaning to a classic text.
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Handmade Books through the years
Reading for Pleasure
All of us in the publishing house who became readers in childhood did so because we enjoyed it, not because we were made to do it. In fact, we grew up in an era – say around fifty years ago – when parents discouraged ‘story books’ and urged us to concentrate on school work instead. It was perhaps easier then to discover the pleasure of reading as a way to wander imaginatively into another world – there were not many other options vying for our attention. So why is reading still – or even more – important? Because it is surprisingly active and creative, in what it asks of us – the words tell us a story, but the details of the world they conjure up is always filled in by the reader’s own imagination. The act of reading for pleasure is a form of play. No two people read the same book in the same way. A child reader is a reader for life – and it is this insight which gave us the impetus to start publishing books which would interest a child, without an obvious moral thrust on them. We would still stand by our early convictions today, maybe just add something for our current times, which is that reading slows us down. When we are absorbed in a book, it makes us focus for long periods of time – particularly vital in an era which is determined to capture our attention at all costs, and in the process, distract us continually.
Handmade Books through the years
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