Shalini Biswajit is very busy at the moment, making sure the paintings of Aadimoolam and others have been hung exactly right. She sports ease and emanates no sense of insecurity while she goes about hanging her fellow artists’ works. Well, she has been doing it for years now, balancing a dual career as an artist and as the director of Forum, the art centre and gallery that she has created in Chennai. That is Shalini for you – confidence unlimited.

While she started off with paintings, lately Shalini has been shifting focus into installation art. “It is not a shift really, more of a parallel thing,” she says, adding, “the impressive thing about sculpture as a medium is that it is tactile; it also exists in a three dimensional form in space and so seems to hold a touch of immortality”. Ranging from the huge (the huge out door installation at the Kongu Engineering College) to the tiny, her installations are about elegance and colour crafted into solid metal. In the process, Shalini has also meandered into creating art from junk metal. For instance, the metal Vinayaka that greets you at the entrance of her gallery in south Chennai has been assembled from discarded pipes and the like. “When I see some metallic object, I am drawn to the form it suggests,” she says. But that by itself will not do. She also ropes in her foundry to fashion the metallic forms she needs. Unlike other sculptors’ works, you also discover colour in her metallic installations. It is perhaps the woman in her that prompts her to play with colour in her metallic sculptures.

‘Detached Attachment’
For instance in her series ‘Detached Attachment’, she has sprayed a pink hue of automobile paint on to the delicately soldered petals figuring in it, which gives it a look of tensile strength and grace at the same time. Her paintings reveal the same passion for colour, and romantic pinks and bright blues figure in quite a bit of her paintings. Her visual vocabulary has been proceeding towards simpler and simpler lines, though the colour codes haven’t changed over the years.

More than the huge installations, it is Shalini’s smaller ones with their delicate twists and fragile forms which impress. While her earlier paintings tended to be very descriptive, over time, they have turned more and more abstract.

But right through her career, be it as a painter or sculptor, the female form has predominated in her works. Men do figure, but they are more like afterthoughts and additions to the work. The inward looking woman is her focus, generally, unless in a commissioned work such as her installation at Kongu Engineering college in Perundhurai in Tamil Nadu, where she has fashioned a tree of learning akin to the tree of life, with various branches essaying various subjects, and CDs and other scientific objects hanging from the trees rather than fruits. All along, the women in her works have been reflecting Shalini’s tastes and thoughts. “I suppose I am the protagonist in my works,” she admits.

Symbol of lotus
The lotus is a favoured symbol with Shalini and it had figured in her paintings too. “It signifies so many things, apart from the detached attachment,” she voices. “The women in my paintings are icons of a fire of passion that ignites from within.The women in my paintings and also the sculptures in the series ‘Detached Attachment’ seek to pursue the calling of their hearts. In their eyes, life is a sublime and spiritual journey filled with both ethereal and earthly elements that give shape and form to substance.

She scales pinnacles of successes with dreams and beliefs kindled by an inner fire. She desires to stay afloat seeking inspiration from the lotus, and aspires to reach the pinnacle within.The lotus is her muse, guide and mentor. They are part of the world, of daily existence, yet above it, yearning for liberation,” she says eloquently. A versatile artist, Shalini likes to pen poems and experiment with terracotta too.

A lesser known side to her persona is her inroads into art therapy, which she does for children predominantly, be it the orphans at the nearby Andhra Mahila Sabha or the critically ill children at the Apollo Specialties Hospital in Chennai. “I am not a physician, I can’t heal; but through art, I can relieve suffering. Ideally, every hospital should incorporate art therapy to their patient support system. Art is powerful. It can at the very least distract the person from his/her physical pain,” she insists. At 42, Shalini leads a life that is both practical and ethereal.The same duality is seen in her works, which while looking decorative have their practical connotations too.

Shalini Biswajit’s works (paintings and sculptures) figure in prestigious collections like that of Savera Hotel, Madras Race Club, Ford India, Apollo Hospitals (Chennai and Bangalore), besides commissioned large scale works such as at the Kongu Engineering College, and Chennai’s famed IT corridor.