Disposable surfaces for an indispensable statement on life
When her parents fought — and they fought often — Abhidnya Ghuge always had the henna shrub to make her feel better.
This was during the 1970s and ’80s in what is now Mumbai, India, before the city became Westernized. Ghuge doesn’t remember anyone owning a TV then, even her family’s many educated friends.
A sensitive girl, she was encouraged to draw, and she made her own ink from the plant in her family’s back yard, pulling the leaves and grinding them into a paste on a stone, then using a toothpick to make designs on skin.
Years later, living in the U.S., Ghuge (pronounced GOO-gay) was still making henna patterns
as doodles on paper.
More recently, she has been using them in contemporary art, starting with large, handcut woodblocks that she uses to print paper plates by the thousands, to be rolled and inserted into chicken wire. The organic forms she creates have become a signature, and small museums across the country are inviting her to create installations with them.
“Changing Perspectives,” Ghuge’s solo show at the Galveston Arts Center, is built around an installation made from about 5,000 paper plates.
Two days before the opening, a trio of volunteers was helping Ghuge roll the thin plates and stuff them into a wire form that hung in a snaking oval from the ceiling. Curator Dennis Nance popped in, wishing he had time to join them.
“I find her work really sincere,” he said. “It’s taking this humble material and really transforming it.”
Paper plates became Ghuge’s material of choice after a death. Two deaths, really. ‘We are all disposable’
Before becoming an artist, Ghuge was a dermatologist.
She pursued that career to be obedient, to support her mother and brother after her parents divorced. Her brother was handicapped, suffering all of his life from what she suspects was encephalitis. His disease was never diagnosed.
“Back then, India was in the dark ages medically,” Ghuge said, referencing the early 1990s. “We didn’t even have a CT scanner in the hospital.”
During her time at medical school, Ghuge married Dr. Raghavendra Ghuge, and they had a son. Then, suddenly, her brother died. He was 29.
Ghuge’s mother urged the young couple to move to the U.S. so they could put their medical knowledge to better use.
They obliged and landed in Detroit for Raghavendra’s residency, then the tiny East Texas town of Henderson, near Tyler, where they built his practice and added a daughter to their family.
Between raising the kids and helping out at Raghavendra’s office, Ghuge never returned to her own medical practice. When she finally had a window to return to school, she chose to start over and study art.
She was in the midst of her undergrad studies when the second unexpected death happened: The 14-year-old son of a dear friend, a boy the same age as their son, Advait, fell from the roof of his school and died instantly.
Ghuge paused here in her story. It’s still hard for her to tell. She swallowed hard, fighting back tears.
At the time, she and Raghavendra were preparing to buy a home in Tyler, living in a condo and eating supper from paper plates, when the call came from India. It made her feel like life was as disposable as the paper plate in her lap.
“We are all disposable,” she said. “But what you do between the time you are made and the time that you die is more important than the place you are born or how you die.”
She began making sculptural forms with the white paper plates she had around the house, aiming to transform them into something with more lasting value.
It was a start, but that work still felt empty.
Ghuge was also thinking about the value Westerners place on life.
In India, where the population is more than 1.3 billion, “life is not important. Especially the life of a girl or a woman,” she said. “I wanted to show that every life is important. … What I wanted to create was, how do I put life into the paper plates?”
As luck would have it, she was learning printmaking techniques and creating woodblocks in the art studio at the University of Texas at Tyler. She could see a life cycle in that process — trees become wood, wood becomes paper and, with art, she was returning some kind of life to the dead paper.
Wisely, she ignored the advice of a professor who thought her woodblock patterns should look more “American.”
“I am American now, assimilated in the culture,” she said, “but I spent over two decades in India, and the henna design will never leave me.” The value of work
Henna patterns contain universal truths, based on nature and its repetitions, a paradigm that extends to human bodies.
Organic patterns are everywhere inside us, Ghuge said: An ear is like a chambered nautilus. Brain arteries look like tree branches and so on. And so she began printing her plates with henna-inspired patterns.
She began turning them into installations because she also wanted to give viewers an experience that might make a difference in their lives, even if it was just a moment of respite from the craziness outside art centers.
“There is enough sadness in the world, and enough artists making work about that,” she said. “I wanted to have a space-altering installation that would create a positive energy.”
Ghuge spent about six months creating the elements of the Galveston installation: about three months to carve the woodblocks, then another three to print the 5,000 plates, run them through a press in her Tyler studio and seal them. This time, for the first time, she also hand-dyed the plates first, submerging then in liquid for a few days, putting a watery blue layer under the henna-inspired prints.
Miraculously, they didn’t disintegrate. Ghuge uses the cheapest plates she can find, not to be frugal but because, she said, “That is how we start: We are simple and non-coated.”
Her labor-intensive process is as purposeful as everything else in her art.
“The other thing I saw when I came into this culture was that people did not want to work hard. They sit on the couch, eat chips, order pizza,” she said. “Where I came from, everything was hard work, everything was handmade, and everything was valued.”
Enlisting help from the community and volunteers emphasizes that “labor is appreciated.”
Ghuge can’t imagine making art that isn’t rich with metaphoric possibilities.
“I don’t have any choices that are just, it was cool, so I used it,” she said. “Maybe I’m just too serious. I should lighten up. But I feel like I am cheating the viewers if I just do something frivolous. They take time to come and see my work. So I give them my best.”
three It Ghuge Abihnyatook monthsabout artist woodblocks,to carve the then another three to print the 5,000 plates, run them through a press in her studio and seal them.