Stairwell Wall Art

Stairwell — 19 museum-grade prints sized and toned for the room. Sohrai is a harvest-season wall art of Hazaribagh district, Jharkhand, painted by women of tribal and Kurmi communities in natural earth pigments — manganese black, hematite red, kaolin white and ochre yellow — on a daubed mud wall to welcome cattle home after the rice harvest, around Diwali. The tree of life, loaded with birds, peacocks, deer and cattle, is a fertility and abundance motif on these walls — the whole living world held on one trunk. Gond painting comes from the Gond Adivasi communities of central India, with its best-known school formed by the Pradhan Gond of Patangarh and the wider Dindori region of Madhya Pradesh. The contemporary form is largely the legacy of Jangarh Singh Shyam (1962–2001), whose distinctive line-and-in-fill manner — every form bounded by a bold outline, then filled with rows of dots, dashes, commas and scales — became known as Jangarh Kalam and was carried on by his family and students. Mata ni Pachedi means 'the cloth of the Mother Goddess' — a ritual shrine textile of the Vaghri / Devipujak ('worshippers of the Goddess') community of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, who, barred from temples, painted the Goddess on cloth to make their own portable shrine. Walking in procession to a hilltop shrine of the Mother — a madh, such as the famed Ashapura Mata na Madh in Kachchh — is a long-standing form of Gujarati Goddess devotion, undertaken on foot with flags and offerings.

Updated 22 Jun 2026