Vriddhi Sawlani’s photo series ‘Steel Life’ captures her great grandmother’s domestic life, highlighting the extraordinary in everyday objects like steel utensils. Inspired by European still life paintings, the series explores memory, intimacy, and familial connections through artistic portraits of inanimate objects that reflect her great grandmother’s essence.
In Vriddhi Sawlani’s work as a photographer and installation artist, memory serves as a very important catalyst. She uses it as a vehicle to access and explore the crevices of her own life and emotions, unlocking something very special in the viewer.
Her previous exhibition, ‘A Lot On My Plate’, explored grief and the pain of being a daughter to a man who never wanted to be a father, through ceramic and brass plates in a two-part exhibit. Sawlani’s latest photo series, ‘Steel Life’, captures her great grandmother in her element. Portraits of the simple life she leads, from the tea routine she follows like clockwork every day to the used and reused fabrics spread across her home, the series aims to highlight the extraordinary behind ordinary objects.
Inspired by still life paintings from 17th and 18th century Europe, the series transposes that format to domestic, familial Indian life, seeing how the form transforms and adapts. In India, steel utensils are omnipresent. They are a symbol of domesticity and are most often passed down from one generation to another. Sawlani captures her great grandmother’s spoons, containers and plates, her most used and most prized possessions, with the same kind of artistic gaze that European painters brought to their bowls of fruit and vases of flowers. The goal of both styles is to take a snapshot of inanimate everyday objects in their natural element, zooming in on details of items in our lives that we often take for granted or don’t notice.
The photos serve as portraits, with every little object a puzzle piece that comes together to form a descriptive portrait of Sawlani’s great grandmother. Photographing her at her most comfortable and at ease makes the series feel strangely intimate, even when she herself isn’t in the frame. It’s almost like a trip into the life and mind of her great grandmother, taking the time to understand what makes her who she is.
“Steel Life’ in Sawlani’s monikered artistic style manages to find the unseen and forgotten parts of our lives that truly build our homes and in turn our lives. The series unpacks and dissects domestic life and the memories that the walls and objects in our homes hold.
Follow Vriddhi Sawlani (Cigarette Greys) on Instagram here.
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