By Nainu Oommen

Copyright thehindu

Self-taught artist Anu Kalikal’s exhibition, Lines of Flight, currently on at Alliance Française de Trivandrum, is filled with motifs closely linked to nature. The exhibition is like an ode to her early association with flora and fauna. Recurring appearances of elephants remind the artist of elephant sightings in temple processions during her vacations in Pathanamthitta, reflecting her yearning for childhood and her battles with mental health issues as an adult.

Anu, 42, who took to painting at an early age, was into murals while studying at Madras Christian College. After a year’s break following her graduation, she joined the Master of Fine Arts programme at Stella Maris College in Chennai. However, she was soon diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder after years of having the symptoms.

She returned to her family in Dubai and did not paint for five years. “I used to imagine painting on a canvas by throwing colours at it. That was it,” Anu says.

“One day my body started having tremors, which looked like epilepsy. When my neurologist saw that, he asked me what I preferred to do in my free time. When I told that I liked to paint, he asked me to get back to it immediately. His prognosis was that I had stressed out my body without doing anything for so long that I got the tremors.”

Restarting took a lot of work, she says. “I spent time as a volunteer at an art gallery in Bengaluru and saw it as treatment. I find art as a remedy for my health issues. You cannot separate art from me. It is an obsession and passion for me,” says Anu.

This is Anu’s 17th exhibition and it showcases 27 works, mostly acrylic paintings and pen drawings on paper with scribbles and dots. “When the tremors are worse, it is easier to use pens, rather than brushes. Since college, I have been a pen artist. The dotting technique is therapeutic,” says Anu.

The Rooster and Me, in acrylic and alcoholic ink, shows Anu in a state of slumber awaiting the bird’s intervention to wake her to witness the sunrise. In Extinction and Nature, the artist laments the destruction of nature. She questions the definition of success and its futility if you lack compassion. A clear duality emerges from the painting, hinting at the possibility that the artist painted one side of the work during an aggravated phase of her illness and the other when it had subsided.

In Procrastination, Anu uses acrylic and pen to point out different types of procrastinators who avoid actual work by replacing it with “sleeps of different kind”. She uses dogs to represent each of them, kept next to a wall, a clock, and a swing— all representing reasons for delaying work.

The artist uses a pen to draw Speed, an artwork containing horses, as they appeared to her during a dream. Unable to trace where they came from or where they went to, the work infers the animal’s unwillingness to clarify a purpose, ambition, or destiny.

Anu also further questions the reality of her dreams—a symptom of her illness, she says. “When you have episodes of psychosis, you forget a lot of things, you are unable to distinguish between what is real and what is not,” says Anu.

She also showcases two sculptures at the exhibition. One is a wooden elephant, spotted with bindis. “Everything I do has dots, so I thought why not for this too,” says Anu. The Sitting Artist, an installation made of medicine strips, is a self-representation—the pills in the plastic cases were consumed by the artist herself. “It is a statement of success about a journey I went through,” says Anu.

The artist adds, “Many people have connected with the exhibition; some of them have mental health issues or know people who are going through the same. It is still a taboo subject in Kerala and not easy to accept. However, things are getting better.”

Anu Kalikal’s Lines of Flight is on till October 10.