Creative Expressions from Auroville

A bullock has coloured yarns wrapped around its horns; a brightly-coloured scarf flies past the Inuksuk in the International Zone; a lithophone bridges a canyon crevice; Bendi toys join in a yoga class…

These are some of the unexpected images contained in Creative Expressions from Auroville, a lavish coffee-table offering from Auroville Collaborative. “Its an introduction to the diversity of the arts and crafts of Auroville,” explains Vimal, the photographer and initiator of the project. “But its not a catalogue; there is no attempt to sell these products. Its more about the feeling of the artistic scene here; who the artists are and what comes out of their explorations, set against the larger background of Auroville.”

Consequently, the photos in this book are as much about process – artists and craftspeople at work in their studios, shots of their tools etc. – as about products. Even some of the photos have an unfinished feel, as if catching a precarious moment in the creative process. The minimalist texts, based on the words of the artists themselves, also give insights into how they work and what they are attempting to manifest. For example, a photo of a concentrated woodworker, Kenji, seen through planks of wood in his workshop is characterized as “the moment that the seeker becomes the translator; where he meets the wood face to face. At this moment a dialogue begins and both – the wood and the man – decide what the wood wishes to be.”

As for the unexpected juxtapositions, they are not driven solely by aesthetics. They also say something about the Auroville creative process. How people here are looking for a new way of perceiving things, playing with new combinations of materials and perspectives. And how the heat and dust of our daily lives, mediated through an artists sensibility, can throw up unexpected results. As Mallika Sarabhai puts it in her introduction to the book, in Auroville “red mud lanes, dusty for most of the year, lead to hidden gems of immense beauty”.

“It is also partly an introduction to Auroville through the arts and crafts,” explains Vimal, “I wanted to show different aspects of Auroville through the products. In fact, the whole feeling of the Auroville background was very important for me. Sometimes I would have a piece with me for weeks before I found the right place to shoot it.”

Vimal explains that the larger idea behind the book was to find a way of bringing Auroville artists and craftspeople together, in the same way that Auroville Consulting created the education and green portal initiatives to bring people together in those fields. “We printed one copy as part of the project and made a public presentation of it to the artists,” explains Vimal. “This copy also went to the Auroville exhibition in Delhi. For a long time, we could not find a publisher for the book, so I thought that it was supposed to be a single piece, just like the other art pieces in that exhibition. But then Dharmesh of Kala Kendra said that it was a good book and came up with a revolving publication fund to publish the book.”

Creative Expressions is an unusual and creative production, marred only by some elementary type-setting errors. In its impressionistic approach it captures or, at least, hints at that search for inner beauty and truth projected into outer forms that is one of the most important aspects of our explorations in Auroville.