JOIN USThe Republic Day celebrations at Lucknow held a special significance for artist Uma Sharma as she received the Uttar Pradesh government's 'Artist of the Year' award. But awards have been coming to this one-of-a-kind collage artist for more than two decades. She has also been acknowledged in the World Book of Records for producing the world's largest collage work, as also the world's smallest collage art.
A resident of Mathura, she prides herself on bringing to the fore the riverscapes of her beloved city, the ghats of Haridwar and other spots teeming with the architecture of temple spires rising tier upon tier, while the banks below are teeming with people taking dips or taking in the scene.
It was the completion of the world's largest collage artwork that gave Uma Sharma's artistry focus not just as an artistic achievement, but also for its unique collage application.
Stretching across a length of 10 metres and covering a two-metre width of canvas space, it was minutely 'peopled' with the inclusions of the city's landmark architecture, made with paper scraps torn haphazardly that are then pasted with Fevicol. This adds gloss to the surface and fixes it. "The Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai had spotted the work and then invited me to hold an exhibition in their gallery," she recounts.
Choice of themes
Her choice of works for this showing veered from the scenic theme to things nearer home. She created a series of 10 large canvases depicting women going about their domestic chores. The emphasis was on the routine of rural women churning buttermilk, husking grain, and the common sight of a vegetable vendor. The contours of village homes and street scenes of marketplaces in Mathura were other aspects that she depicted through her art. Naturally, the show had drawn favourable comments both in terms of her technique and her choice of views of her immediate surroundings, giving her art an authentic feel.
The love affair with torn scraps, says Uma Sharma, was a carry-over of her childhood memories and her mother. "She used discarded paper to make papier mache and create large stands for kitchen use. When the stands lost colour and looked old, she would pound the material and give it to us to roll into items we fancied. Thus, fashioning discards into useful items became second nature, and in my own home, I stopped selling old magazines and newspapers to the kabadi. Then, inspired, I fashioned a Ganesha image with torn paper pieces; that was the initiation ceremony of my artistic journey," she recalls.
Drawn from print
With this propitious start, the artist has veered into a pioneering role of sorts. "I do not make a sketch of what I intend to make. The architecture on my canvas grows upwards and becomes a panoramic stretch. When it comes to faces, I look at their angles and use different skin tones torn from scraps of advertisements or apparels of people displayed in them, to make my work. The apparels of the women in my collages, the brilliant reds and yellows, for instance, come from the dresses of models in fashion advertisements. So, I'm never at a loss for the right colour combinations for my art," she says.
This pursuit, Uma claims, is extremely satisfying. She spends half a day each day on her art and feels satisfied with her contribution towards preserving the environment. "I did not know that I had made my own medium through my art, and I will continue to propagate this art form by teaching and exhibiting it to as many people as I can," says this innovator who has given India a new and sustainable artistic vocabulary.