Giving wings to tradition

ISSUE: 133

Drawn to imagery that acts as a record of an age, Smruthi Gargi Eswar’s work is inspired not only by the past, but also nature and the feminine energy

Please tell us a little about yourself. 

SGE: I work under the title of Studio Smu because I have travelled between design and art, back and forth from the very beginning. At a very young age, I knew I wanted to be in visual arts. After school, I wanted to study fine art and then eventually move to design – I believed I would have something new if I travelled that journey between the two. I always found myself taking the fine art language into the design, but ironically enough, after a few years, I took my design work and my skills from there into my art practice! I am now happily oscillating between the two and I think of myself as somebody who prefers the freedom of not being constrained completely by art or design – my practice allows that.

Who are your favourite contemporary artist maestros? 

SGE: I love the work of Stefan Sagmeister – such an eccentric, fertile mind – and the way he oscillates between design and art. I also like Maria Carlman, who is an illustrator for the New Yorker. Her book Principles of Uncertainty is a diary of her paintings and drawings. It changed the way I thought I wanted to be a visual artist or designer. In India, I like Jyoti Dogra, who is a performance artist – her last piece about the black hole is spectacular. 

What role do contemporary artists play in shaping culture and society? 

SGE: I’m not sure this applies only to contemporary art so I’m going to talk generally about art as a space. It is a space where we can explore the unknown. It’s a space where one can linger without being attracted to the known, and find refuge in that. To stay in the unknown and experiment is what I think of as the contemporary art space because it allows for experimentation. I think of contemporary artists as people who live on the outskirts of society where they can look in and reflect society on itself. Art finds very many different ways of doing that, and I feel like that’s its purpose in some way. Art is a thing like the nature of truth. A living breathing organism that moves and travels. It’s not a stagnant thing. Today I can sit here and describe art and tomorrow it will be something else, so I like that about art, and definitely one of the things about it is that it’s an aid for society to view itself

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