The chant—where we do and do again the cyclicality of care, in order to repair and to mend. Revolutions of the same.
Shailee Mehta’s anthologies of making are informed deeply by the incongruence and unarguable beauty that shape both the body and the land. For her, the mediums she uses perform a balancing—a bridge between idea and iteration. Drawing is quiet meditation—a mode of mark-making that collapses the distance between body and surface. Painting, a slower, performative act, weaves intricate, imbricated narratives together. Through these, she extends—sometimes in freefall—layered worlds with cyan nights of tilting companionship, and the end of time, fraying in soft, sallow light.
In rendering the body, Shailee distills the immediacy of her encounters, imaging the feminine in agile and agential forms, permeable in meaning and interpretation. Solitary figures, rendered in pencil, emerge in self-reflection. In her oil paintings, the figures and foliage oscillate between gestures and tones across acts of looking, listening, and making.
In some of these works, the body is framed supine; it is upturned yet unyielding. In
others, the body appears in incline; it leans and it bends, as bodies bend, towards
nurturing and supportive forces. It touches, in reparation, to mend. These bodies learn how to speak, and invite you to move with them. They scale sinuous borders between purple realms. They look with curious intent at small findings. It is their largesse and kinship that envelops and guides you.
They are the threshold. They perform the thresholding.
With deliberate, attentive verse, Chants from the Hollow traces the depth of colour and form across resting places, renewal, and the orbits of uncertain memory. Here, in these works, leisure is wild—an enmeshment of visible and invisible relationships forged in hollows that hold. Desire is collective; it lengthens with skin, stretching and folding orbits of the intimate and the domestic into one another.
The insistence of continuity is met with unfinish, and somewhere it seems, the antidote to it all is repetition.
- Annalisa Mansukhani
