Brinjal Shrine. Drawings From the covid diaries series, 2020

Megha Joshi  

This set of drawings has been like a Covid-19 diary of one woman and her domestic realm. Simone de Beauvoir, the century's most iconic feminist scholar, called the burden of women's housework a "Sisyphean torture." In her book The Second Sex, she says, "Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: clean becomes dirty, dirty is cleaned, again and again, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she does nothing, she simply perpetuates the present... Eating, sleeping, cleaning: the years no longer soar skyward, they stretch out ahead, gray and identical. The battle against dust and grime is never won." This sort of sums up the inspiration behind these artworks. So there are vegetables, fruits, and flowers, etc., playful battles with the cleaning series, the tragedy of the death of the pigeon in her studio, etc. Each one is a true story. Much of Megha Joshi's artistic practice focuses on gender, ritual and religion, although her uniqueness lies in her ability to express herself on a variety of subjects, in a variety of media. She has worked with conventional materials such as steel, fabric, bronze, rubber and, most interestingly, everyday objects and materials used in Hindu ritualism. His works are strong but experimental, as he does not believe in the forced homogeneity of artworks. From the covid diaries series Watercolour on paper mix media.