A large part of my childhood was spent in a rural setting where staring at an army of ants feasting merrily on sugarcane was fun. After getting bored, I would shift my attention to stare at the happy goats and cows around my huge house while they wiggle their ears and tails while grazing on green grass, however back in Mumbai my life looks very different. The sights and sounds I am exposed to here is a different ecosystem of sorts.
My journey from Thakurganj in Bihar to Mumbai led me to explore the transition from rural to the urban kind, it helped me see and analyze my creative thought process in a different way. As an artist when I create, the inspiration comes to me from these two different worlds, from what I have experienced in the past and the present.
In Mumbai amidst the urban setting, I am not sure how many people would actually interpret or create things the way I do. This is partly because most of them grew up watching a city where nature was already replaced with man-made creations.
Exposure is not merrily exposure, for an artist, to quite an extent it is the language of a designer’s creations. Hence the kind and extent of exposure a designer receives in a lifetime opens up the mind to numerous possibilities of the creative kind, helping him/her to add more uniqueness to his or her products.
My own journey as a designer began with my exposure to cartons which I could repurpose for a number of products. Exposure I thus believe is like god, since the divine add meaning to everything, from a grain of sand to a sculpture of stone and in my case perhaps cartons which gave my creative thought process a proper direction. It truly matches up to what we believe in that the divine is omnipresent, in desi lingo “Bhagwan Har Jagah Hai”