Diaspora Home Wall Art

Diaspora Home — 390 museum-grade prints sized and toned for the room. Aipan is the ritual floor- and wall-art of the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, made traditionally by Kumaoni women with white rice-paste (biswar) drawn by fingertip onto a geru — red-ochre earth — ground, most often at thresholds, courtyards and household shrines before festivals and life-rites. The strictly two-tone white-on-geru discipline is the heart of the form and distinguishes it from multicolour Mithila/Madhubani work. DESIGN BRIEF: the brief was the moment after the cut, so the hero is a large oval medallion holding the threshing floor itself — pairs of yoked oxen walking a circle over the grain while figures drive them and toss it with winnowing forks — and the rest of the harvest stacks in bands above and below. We held the fill to medium and kept the fish-net frame open rather than a packed mesh, with clear oxblood ground around the oval so the oxen, the sheaves and the winnowing read at a glance. Khovar is the marriage wall art of Hazaribagh district, Jharkhand, combed by women of tribal and Kurmi communities onto the bridal chamber before a wedding, using a sgraffito technique — wet white kaolin slip over a dark base coat, combed and scratched away with a broken comb so the dark ground reads as line. Paired fish are a classic Khovar fertility motif, promising plenty and increase to the new household, alongside lotus and peacocks.

Updated 22 Jun 2026