Suchitra Mattai
By Mark Jenkins
When introducing viewers to her Indian heritage, Suchitra Mattai is also reconstructing it for herself. The title of the multidisciplinary artist’s ambitious National Museum of Women in the Arts exhibition, “Myth From Matter,” encapsulates her process. Mattai repurposes Indian artifacts — often old saris — to weave a vision of her ancestral homeland.
The artist was born in Guyana to descendants of indentured servants brought from India, then a British colony, to other British territories in the Caribbean region. (An estimated 1.6 million South Asians, recruited to replace Africa-rooted people freed from enslavement, made the trip between 1837 and 1917.) But Mattai’s family moved to Canada when she was a baby, and the artist attended U.S. universities and is now based in Los Angeles. She didn’t visit India until she was an adult.
Indian art, design and culture are nonetheless central to Mattai’s work. “Myth From Matter” includes vast braided-textile pieces, some of which gather their strands into human form, and a site-specific installation of small white temple-style sculptures. These plaster-and-salt figures are derived from yakshis, female nature spirits that embody fertility and prosperity in Hinduism.
The salt memorializes Mattai’s family’s ocean journey, also the inspiration for one of the most personal pieces: “Siren Song,” a circular edifice woven from vintage saris and other fabric. An archway on one side allows entrance to the intentionally womblike space, and a glance upward reveals seascapes on the circular video screen that serves as the structure’s ceiling. The watery views are of Mattai’s voyages through the Indian and Atlantic oceans, roughly following the passage of her great-great-grandfather from India to Guyana.
Mattai’s India-centered art engages with the West in various ways. Sometimes she remakes notable European artworks, incorporating darker skin tones in a process she calls “brown reclamation.” Her “Double Helix” pairs a broken shard of a Greco-Roman-style relief sculpture with a painting on a wooden panel cut to mirror the shape of the older piece. Both parts depict standing figures, but the sculpture is weathered and off-white, while the painting is brightly multicolored in the South Asian mode. It depicts a woman in a green sari who’s holding a red snake, a symbol of rebirth.
Mattai doubles back on European appropriation of Eastern motifs by altering pages from architect Owen Jones’s 1856 book, “The Grammar of Ornament.” (Born in London to Welsh-speaking parents, Jones can be seen as another of Britain’s colonized.) The volume was a crucial source for Western designers who drew from Asian and Middle Eastern traditions. Mattai places pictures of brown-skinned women and girls, as well as her own decorative embellishments, atop sheets from Jones’s catalogue of adornments.
“Myth From Matter” contends directly with the art Mattai reinterprets by bringing some of the originals into the exhibition. Mattai and NMWA assistant curator Hannah Shambroom arranged to borrow works from several local museums. So “Future Perfect,” Mattai’s brown-reclamation of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s “Young Girl Reading,” is displayed next to the actual 18th-century French painting, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.
Mattai’s update of the Fragonard painting is overlaid on a mass-produced needlepoint reproduction. In addition to browning the subject’s skin, the artist has appended a black halo, freshwater pearls and the word “future” on the book the girl is reading. By remaking an anonymous fabric work, Mattai highlights the uncelebrated domestic labor of uncounted women and girls. Like other contemporary female textile artists, Mattai reclaims “women’s work” as one woman’s art.
Other borrowed objects pay tribute to Mattai’s influences. Featured are Auguste Rodin’s small marble sculpture of a dead child’s hand, also from the National Gallery, and Louise Bourgeois’s towering pair of legs, courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Providing more context for Mattai’s undertaking are several 18th-century pieces by unknown makers, among them an American landscape on cotton and a Persian-influenced Indian miniature painting of women in a garden. The former is from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the latter from the National Museum of Asian Art.
If Mattai’s concerns occasionally seem academic, her pieces can be direct and moving. “She Arose (From a Pool of Tears)” is a life-size Indian dancer that sprouts from a knotted rug and takes an ecstatic pose. Base and figure are one continuous form, braided from old saris. The artwork is a powerful metaphor for the artist’s process and sensibility. From the commonplace artifacts of generations of Indian women, Mattai fabricates not just myth but also history and personal identity.
