Looking through Shanthi Swaroopini’s new works on paper made during the pandemic of 2020, gives one the overwhelming impact and feeling of the preciousness of fragments of time pieced together through intense flashes of startling imagery. Her enormous skill in translating her clarity of the experienced moment into visual simplicity speaks volumes for the maturity of her vision and her intuitive alignment with the very basic materials available to her in the confines of Covid isolation. It brings one back to the essential elements of art making of personal expression of the everyday- Shanthi’s is a unique voice which resonates with the essence of humanity’s experience. For women artists working in isolation, the reality is often an investigation into an examination of social realities and cultural myths. Changes made in the art production itself encourages the viewer to emancipate themselves and recognise they share the same repressions in a sensual solidarity of a communal response.

Shanthi’s early sculptural works was an explosion which reinserted and sought to valorise women’s personal experience into art practice. Her central core imagery was that of pride in the female body and spirit- a celebration of the body’s rhythms and pains- of female knowledge and experience. Shanthi’s sculptures of the feminine spirit used the body as the site of archetypal symbols of life and death. Nature and woman were as interlinked as the waxing and waning of cycles of earth and moon.