Archana Rajguru

Born

Education
She is an alumna of Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan and MSU University,  Vadodara, and has taught in various places including as a senior faculty at NID, Ahmedabad.
Exhibition
She has also worked as an animator with some prestigious animation studios of Hyderabad. Archana lives and works out of Guwahati.

In her personal art practice, surprisingly, her works are not just completely hand crafted, but in a medium that is traditionally considered feminine. Archana works largely with yarns; handling of the yarn in different manners excites her aesthetic senses, which in itself sets her apart as a creative person. Initially she used to stitch complex patterns on pieces of cloth, occasionally on over-sized garments, creating semi abstract and extremely expressive and expressionistic images with plain running stitches. The exhibits in this exhibition are however of a completely different and unique genre by themselves – masks made with the crochet needle and yarn. What is amazing about these masks is that they are very human in look and expression, but expressionistic in representation, this strange duality imbuing an unnerving, dramatic quality in them. Especially when the masks are frontal and are looking straight at you. They possess a monumental, larger than life quality by virtue of their elongation, colourfulness, and their large mouths showing prominent teeth. They have individual character, and that again makes them a trifle disturbing, because one feels like one knows them; has known them from somewhere in the past, yet they are supremely unrecognizable. It’s a feeling like deja-vu; and nothing is more fascinating than when something makes one get that intense feeling of familiarity of a place or situation that one has not encountered in this lifetime. This enigmatic quality of her part real, part unreal masks instill such powerful life into these larger than life size masks of Archana.

Archana’s masks are pieces of sculpture and not wearable.