resilience through art

A girl, with an infectious vivacity and a demeanour that makes others happy, walks to and fro on the streets of Connaught Place, just outside People Tree. I meet her, Pankhuri, the one behind the T-shirt movement. And I am quickly taken in by her enthusiasm, her abundant willingness to ‘share’, by her generosity. (She even bought me an iced tea!) We sit inside a neighbouring café, and over sips of coffee she talks about her ‘resilience through art’.

Pankhuri recently came back from a trip to Leh, where she had conducted four workshops with the children in the relief camps and with little monks from a neighbouring monastery. She had had to postpone all her arrangements due to the devastating cloud burst in the region. Earlier, she had planned to work in other places, but then she could not avoid working in the relief camps. But, she tells me, it was an 'enriching' experience. She takes out her laptop and shows me some pictures of the children and their own little t-shirt paintings while narrating the stories behind them. She tells me about one such story with genuine amazement, “This little boy drew a dragon on his T-shirt. I asked him why he did so and he said that a dragon had taken away his house. And then he made a house on the back of the dragon.”

 

Although she largely works with children, her T-shirt painting exercises are not only restricted to children. She has worked with adults too. She says, with a hint of mischief, “I actually work with the child within each one of us”. And one will understand how if one meets her. Her carefree, comforting presence and her charming ‘Peace and Trees’, when she signs out, would put anyone at ease. She has been painting T-shirts and conducting the ‘resilience through art’ workshops for the last two years, at various schools and colleges, in parks, in the Trimurti Bhavan, etc. And she does this mostly on her own. “I usually create my own projects. But sometimes I work with different groups and NGOs. If anything seems interesting, I do it. Or else, I am constantly thinking about new and different ideas and projects I could build on.”

She tells me about an upcoming exhibition. And I can sense her excitement although she hasn’t decided on the dates and the venue (she does say that she’ll probably put up the works hanging on a tree) as she is at present busy participating in a theatre workshop because “I need to learn more. I don’t want to stay in one place, you know. I don’t want to limit myself with just one thing. So I keep on learning… I learn and then I share. I learn and I share.”

Pankhuri in Leh, after the cloud burst

I ask her to talk about that one special T-shirt she painted. After much hesitation to talk just about one because it would mean that she would have to choose from so many, she did tell me about this T-shirt currently available at People Tree. “It’s basically based on the principles of Abdul Gaffar Khan, peace-leader from Afghanistan. His main principles were faith, right conduct and love. And he created an army of non-violent people, called the Khudai Khidmatgar. So I made this T-shirt based on my imagination of what a Khudai Khidmatgar would wear. And it’s become one of my favourites.” And when I asked if anyone had bought it, she laughed and said, “Well people try it and take photographs of it, but they don’t buy it. I think because it’s expensive in the shop which is selling it.” After a thoughtful pause, she says, “Maybe, it’ just meant to be there.”

By profession, Pankhuri is a wildlife expert. However, slowly, she chooses to move more towards art. And she has found her own way to mix art and ecology. Her T-shirt paintings and her workshops all carry simple messages of “honesty, humility and inter-connectedness.” Apart from painting on T-shirts, she also does jewellery, journals and diaries. In her blog, she says that she uses “natural, used, discarded, forgotten, everyday materials to fashion them into attractive, honest and unique pieces. After all, the laws of nature have been made to be respected, so I take only what I really need.”