As friends, Aparajita Jain Mahajan and Vishakha Swarup decided to fuse their creative pursuits as part of their recently held mixed media and ceramics show – ‘Interactions’ at the Open Palm Court Gallery, India Habitat Centre. Showing a range of their works created over a year using mixed media including paper, acrylic, pen and ink besides ceramics, the exhibition explores the relationship between “diverse intangible elements within spaces and their resulting dynamics”.

“Everything that we have worked on is an interaction between people and their thoughts and how two people react with each other in a situation.  For every involvement there is a thought. For every thought there is an action – some exciting, some insane and some which we would forget, if we could. This interaction between a thought and its cause is what tried to explore,” describes ceramist Swarup.

After completing her graduation as an architect from the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad, and Sushant School of Art and Architecture, Delhi, in 1998, Swarup decided to pursue ceramics. “Architecture gives the confidence to explore. I observe things from my travels and work on that,” she says.

“All our work is in continuity. Ceramic and paintings are two mediums but how they are working together is another aspect that we have tried to experiment with,” Swarup tells Metrolife while referring to her ‘Good Earth’ ceramic piece which showcases a person at peace sitting at the centre of  a mother’s womb (earth) and the rest of  the people (the world) on the edges trying to achieve that level of peace.

While Swarup explores the themes from her travels, Mahajan paints her observations. “My work is fairly abstract but also has a landscape kind of nature to it. I am influenced a lot by what’s around me and the minutest details of things. The different types of energies that are there, conversations of a person, movement of falling leaves or  movement of a person’s arm have some significance in the way I think,” says Mahajan, who worked extensively on animations as part of her graduation from Rhode Island School of Design (USA) and also has done projects with village children in Auroville and Karnataka, besides exhibiting her works in India, France and USA.

She emphasises that despite their works being in different mediums, the works complement each other.

“The idea behind our work is to represent journeys – of a person, his emotions, her ideas of life, why and what for and that is one plausible reason for the complementing hues,” avers Mahajan while pointing out at the interactive piece that both of them have created together made of katran (waste pieces of colourful cloth), wires, tiles and ropes.