Raw Materials
Artist Astha Butail combines contemporary aesthetics and functionality in her wooden clutches and bags
Installation artist and painter Astha Butail’s work thus far has concentrated on her love for creating artworks from wood, but she’s now taking her fascination for the material to the next level. A NIFT Bangalore graduate, whose first installation art piece was displayed at the Victoria University in Melbourne, Butail is now crafting clutches and handbags that tastefully blur the line between fashion and art. Fuss-free, chic, and minimal, Butail perfectly plays to the strengths of the material of her choice, sometimes using wood as the hardy case of the bags, and on other occasions, as a smaller element alongside materials like felt and vinyl. Either way, she ensures wood adds a raw essence to the pieces.
“Experiments are fun, and I love the idea of using something from the ordinary,” says Butail, wife of Jiten Thukral, of the artist duo Thukral and Tagra. “These are combinations of wooden flex without nails or wood, and felt and magnets. The design is not that simple, but lesser elements make it simpler,” she adds. Professing her love for experimenting with textures, both raw and refined, Butail credits her designs to an extensive study of the Rig Veda that she says has brought her closer to the metaphysical world.
An economics graduate turned fashion student, Butail started designing, merchandising, and marketing apparel in 2003, before making a switch to art and design four years later. Her recently concluded project, A Story Within A Story, part of the Sarai 09: The Exhibition at Devi Art Foundation, curated by the Raqs Media Collective, unfolds the complexity and simplicity of life intertwined with illusory limits and convention for frame. It was Butail’s love for bags that initially prompted her to sketch them, later graduating to executing her unusual designs. The bags are available on order only, and can be customised. For more information, contact 098111 42668.