Shalini Bisawajeet’s painting. Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
The gallery of Chennai’s Lalit Kala Akademi hums like an unruly classroom at 11 a.m. Voices overlapping, footsteps echoing, instructions cutting through the air. The atmosphere seems appropriate as the venue is currently hosting The Art of Becoming: Stella(R) Alumni Canvas, a coming together event of 20 artists curated by the Department of Fine Arts at Stella Maris College.
Some people are putting the finishing touches to their installations, making sure the sculptures are in the right place, writing notes and instructions on how to best view the works. At its center is curator Ashrafi S Bhagat, once his professor, now an art historian and critic, moving from one work to the next with a measured eye. The class may be decades behind them, but the discipline remains.
“I conceived this exhibition based on two interconnected ideas – the mystery of the sea and the fragility of time and space,” says Ashrafi. “Both are powerful, mysterious and always changing. Nothing remains constant. If you look at the fragility of time and space, for me it’s memory; time and the space that it occupies in your mind. And that same fragility exists in the ecosystem of the ocean. It is weathered, transformed, sometimes consciously degraded. Both are aspects of life that are constantly in flux.”
The result is not thematic uniformity, but divergence within a shared framework. Some artists have immersed themselves in both concepts; Others have firmly established themselves in one.
For Thejomaye Menon, one of the organizers of the exhibition, the ocean becomes energy in motion. Long associated with personal figurative language, she has consciously moved toward abstraction to explore force rather than form. In this series, layered colored fields of currents emerge on the canvas, circular motions echoing both tidal rhythms and planetary orbits. “I’ve worked on the depths under the sea and connected it to the universe. When we talk about the fragility of time, I think it’s determined by the change of the planets. The planets influence the motion. We may not fully understand it, but time changes with these forces. It’s a mystery,” she says.
“Each of these paintings took about three months,” says Preeta Kannan, standing in front of a canvas decorated with blue and green dots. To discern the intricate details in each painting, she presents a magnifying lens to the viewer. After moving away from painting to do volunteer work in Chennai and later working with Baba Amte in rural India for environmental and social causes, Preeta returned to art with a strong environmental urge.
In her paintings she depicts scenes below the surface of the sea. Metal, plastic, bullets and other debris accumulate while marine life appears to adapt around what humanity has left behind. The sea is not a mystical sight here. It is an archive containing evidence of war, destruction and survival.
Shalini Biswajit, on the other hand, sees the fragility of time as a matter of spiritual urgency. Inspired by years of study of scriptures, particularly Vedantic thought, her work focuses on what she calls “inner repose”, a state of peace that comes in the face of life’s inevitable ups and downs. On canvas, he appears as measured squares in light ochres and blues. Metal figures of a man and a woman are installed on two sides of the same metal statue. She says, “In the time we are given, we should give priority to the reason why we have got this human birth. You don’t know what will happen tomorrow. There is an urgent need to recognize this.”
For Ashrafi, the exhibition is less about nostalgia and more about continuity. Artists may vary in language and medium, but the intellectual rigor remains evident. “I don’t allow uniformity,” she says, smiling. “I wanted individuality. Styles, techniques, expressions should reflect my own sensibility.”
The Art of Making: Stella(R) Alumni Canvas is running from 11 to 16 February, 11am to 7pm at Lalit Kala Akademi.
published – February 11, 2026 04:10 PM IST