Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the work of Pardhan Gond artists from central India, who make a growing contemporary Adivasi art world in India. I share my reflections from long term research in the home-workshops or studio spaces where artists create art works for art fairs, galleries, and museums.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages with the work of Pardhan Gond artists from central India, who make a growing contemporary Adivasi art world in India. I share my reflections from long term immersive research in the home-workshops or studio spaces where artists create art works for art fairs, galleries, and museums.

During the pandemic, I worked at the home-workshops, often painting with women and new artists in their home-workshops as they were finishing up artworks. I observed and participated in the making of repeating patterns that fill up the outlines of figures and forms have become a distinguishing style iconic of this art form. I observed and imitated the artists’ body at work, bending down, repeatedly drawing patterns. With a focus on the repeated movements of making patterns, I read art making as a form of history making, a form of knowledge production by the Gond artists which reconfigures colonial histories and contests institutional frames.

Over time, participating in the art making process revealed to the conjoined forces at work – making art is a livelihood, reconfigures colonial histories and contests institutional frames, but also produces hierarchies and power asymmetries. Those who train and work for more established artists as pattern makers often find that the relations that give them access to mobility also constrain them. The repeated labor of making artworks within the home and family produces relations of mutual interdependence and co-existence but can also generate hierarchies and inequalities, wrapping them in enduring relations of constraints, obligations, and indebtedness.