Comfort Zones/ Comfort Bodies

The series of artworks done under the title ‘Comfort Zones’ is an attempt of looking back at the (middle class) home making women of the previous generations. It is built on memories, memorizing, nostalgia and understanding and misunderstanding. I am looking at women from my own families. They belong to a generation of convent education, crochet curtains, home science and cookery books. The 'Comfort Zones' unveils my familiarity and proximity to this home maker’s world and the anxieties and expectations that manifest in different stages of her life. They are the wives, mothers, grandmothers, aunts. They are the comfort providers for the family and sometimes… they are the silent grievers bearing the aches of life. I remember with nostalgia and guilt the comfort of this home maker’s world. I memorialize this nostalgia and guilt in the ‘Comfort Zone (2004), ‘Memorizing an Era  (2009) and Comfort Dresses (2009)’ . Dinner for Six  (2002/ 2009) summarizes home-maker’s parameters of freedom, the energy invested by her and the negotiations that goes into establishing her existence and her agency within the home as I see it within my families.

It is magical. It’s comforting. It is safe.
It is what we search in the homemaker’s embrace…
The perfumed almirahs, the bosoms of warmth,
The embroidered patterns of starched coverlets
The small  pleasures of the treasured world.
She weaves her desires nurturing… into a labyrinth
The web confines, protects and binds all at once.
It’s the lace menagerie…
Its the white laced Comfort Zone.

I see through the lace curtains
the floral designs, the crystal glasses and the hands that hold the threads.
I try to see the patterned world beyond.
I see the spinning web and the cocoons of comfort that lies within.
I feel the pains of entanglement, the strains of confinement.
I feel the nostalgic urge to memorize and remember
the homemaker of the patterned world.