Documentary Wall Art

Documentary — 5 museum-grade prints that set the mood. Aipan is the ritual floor- and wall-art of the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, drawn traditionally by Kumaoni women with white rice-paste (biswar) applied by fingertip onto a geru (red-ochre) earth ground, at thresholds, courtyards, and household shrines for festivals and life-rituals. This fusion piece takes that act of making as its subject — two women drawing a lotus floor-mandala by lamplight — and renders it in the craft's own two-tone line. Cheriyal scrolls come from Cheriyal village in Telangana's Siddipet district, painted for generations by the Nakashi artist community — a hereditary family of painters who prepared their own khadi-cloth grounds with tamarind-seed paste and rice starch, ground mineral and vegetable pigments, and built each scroll register by register for travelling balladeer-storytellers to unroll while singing epics and caste-origin legends. This print pictures that workshop directly. Pithora is the ritual wall-painting tradition of the Rathwa, Bhil and Bhilala Adivasi communities of Chhota Udepur in eastern Gujarat (and the adjoining belt of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan). The wall is vowed to Babo Pithoro and painted on the inner wall of the home as thanksgiving or to fulfil a wish; only the Lakhara — the priest-painter, also called the Gor — may execute the sacred wall, working to the chants of the badva.

Updated 22 Jun 2026