Capturing the soul of chaos

Hatty Pedder’s latest work is a celebration of Mumbai. The title of the series, “Jhakaas Mumbai — A study of beautiful chaos” uses the typical Mumbai street slang word Jhakaas, which means “amazing”, to express her feelings about the city. Pedder eloquently conveys the spirit and energy of the city through her warm and witty mixed media artworks that depict the colours, the crowds, the chaotic traffic, the hustle and bustle of daily life, the cows on the road, the ubiquitous crows and the spiritual side of this commercial capital of India.

Her work suggests that she knows the city well, but the Dubai based British artist had never been to Mumbai until a few months ago. “My first visit to Mumbai was overwhelming. I had never seen anything like that in my life. I fell in love with the city and found such unimaginably rich material for my work. I went all over the city and took millions of photographs. But I felt compelled to go back for another week to explore it some more. This body of work expresses what I saw, felt and experienced in Mumbai,” says the artist.

Pedder studied graphic design and illustration at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. She moved to Dubai 17 years ago and has worked as an illustrator, photographer and fashion stylist. Two years ago she held her first major exhibition featuring a series of artworks depicting the social scene in Dubai. “I just love to document and report what I see around me. In this new series, I did not want to change my reportage style of working, but wanted to move my subject matter to other places. I chose Mumbai because I have some good friends living there and because on a holiday to Goa long ago, I had fallen in love with the colours of India,” she says.

The artist combines line drawings in black ink with collaged photomontages, embellished with watercolours, gouache, acrylic and spray paints and various decorative elements to create her pieces. Like the city itself, each piece is crowded with myriad people, vehicles, buildings, animals, birds and plants. A striking feature of this series is the shiny aluminium sheets and colourful acrylic pieces she has used as a background in many works.

“Because Mumbai was so rich and electric with colours, I felt that my media had to step up. So I have used new materials such as these neon acrylic sheets that are transparent and luminous as well as shiny materials that remind me of India, such as decorative paper, aluminium and the beautiful stick-on bindis that Indian women wear on their forehead,” she says.

Despite the colours and ornamentation, Pedder’s work depicts ordinary people and mundane scenes from the streets. “I went to Mumbai with the idea of painting glitzy Indian weddings and glamorous Bollywood and society events. But when I actually got there, I was more fascinated by the cars, the trucks, the signage, the packaging, the crows, the colours, the people on the streets and the fact that spirituality is so much a way of life and so evident all around you,” she says.

Pedder is a keen observer of people and places, and each of her pieces tells a story about the many layers of Mumbai society, where extreme wealth and abject poverty exist side by side and spirituality coexists with commerce. A perfect example is the piece titled Bangara Ghat. This colourful panorama features several beautiful temples located on the banks of a pond, a variety of birds, lots of people and even a dog with a religious mark on its forehead. There is a lot of warmth in her detailed recreation of the decorations on the temples and doorways of houses and domestic scenes such as a mother plaiting her daughter’s hair, a child playing with her tricycle, a woman washing clothes in the pond, people feeding the birds, and a man walking by with a bag of groceries in his hand and a religious picture under his arm. A prominent character in this composition is a priest sitting in the courtyard of a temple.

“He looked so peaceful and spiritual that I could not wait to paint him. This was the first work I did after returning from Mumbai and I have used lots of colour to capture the incredible, almost surreal beauty of the scene,” she says.

Pedder’s fascination with the vehicles in Mumbai can be seen in the many pieces featuring trucks, taxis, auto-rickshaws, motorbikes and bicycles complete with the religious and other decorations on them. “Every vehicle had a personality of its own and I have never ever seen such decorations on vehicles,” she says.

In other pieces, a taxi-driver sitting cross legged on his vehicle, a man getting a shave on the street, posters of film stars stuck on shabby buildings and a tiny temple on a lamp-post, capture different facets of life in Mumbai. The artist’s eye for detail can be seen from the way she has recreated the patterns on the sarees worn by the women, the colourful street art and the imaginative decorations on trucks. “I loved the fact that there is art in everything, from the tiny ‘bindis’ to the packaging of ordinary household goods,” she says.

In fact, she has created her own pop-art interpretations of a rice package and a popular brand of incense. “I think these packages are pieces of art in their own right,” she says. But amid all the colour, there are also many black-and-white pieces. For instance, the artist chose to depict the ornate Liberty cinema theatre and the mythological film being screened there in simple line drawings done with black ink on white paper. In fact, she has used the same technique to depict the figures in all the pieces.

“The starting point in all my artworks is the people and although I use photomontage for other elements, the people are always drawn by me. In this colourful series, I made the figures black and white so that they would stand out,” she says.

Other black-and-white artworks in this series include a set of drawings of policemen and policewomen, titled “Guardians of Mumbai”. These were inspired by some hand carved wooden frames that caught her eye while wandering around the city. “These policemen are the shepherds that herd the chaos of Mumbai. But these guardians of the city often remain unnoticed with their khaki uniform almost disappearing in the hustle and bustle of life around them. By putting them in these ostentatious frames, which I absolutely loved, I have tried to take them out of the melting pot of millions and put the focus on them. And to balance the elaborate frames, I drew them with black acrylic pen on a clear acrylic sheet,” Pedder says.

The artist still has a huge collection of unused photographs from Mumbai that she wants to work with. “I am not done with this theme yet. And I also want to explore other cities in India,” she says.

Jyoti Kalsi is an arts enthusiast based in Dubai.

Jhakaas Mumbai — A Study of Beautiful Chaos will run at Mojo gallery in Alserkal Avenue until October 31.