Priya Ravish Mehra

Priya Ravish Mehra (1961–2018) graduated in Fine Arts, with a specialization in textiles from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, and later studied tapestry at West Dean College, Sussex and an advanced tapestry course at the Royal College of Arts, London under the aegis of a Commonwealth Fellowship and Charles Wallace Trust (India) Scholarship. She received an Asian Cultural Council Grant to study the maintenance and preservation of Indian textiles, especially Kashmir shawls, in public and private collections in the US.

Priya’s textile and mixed-media work has been featured as solo exhibitions in British Council, Delhi (1993), Commonwealth Institute, London (1994), Instituto de Artes Plasticas, Mexico (2016), Presence in Absence curated by Tunty Chauhan at Gallery Threshold, Delhi (2017) and ‘India International Center, Delhi (2018). She has participated in group shows: ‘Evidence Room’, KHOJ, Delhi (2017), ‘Detritus’, Serendipity Art Festival, Goa (2017), and Pale Sentinels curated by Salima Hashmi at Aicon Gallery, New York (2018), Bakhiya curated by Tunty Chauhan at Threshold, New Delhi 2020. She exhibited at the Kochi Biennale in 2018.

She began working with organic material, combining natural fibres extracted from paper pulp and bark, embedding and overlapping them to collapse layers between the interior and exterior, the inner and outer being. The skeins and veins under the surface created an expressive texture, while the partial traces opened the work to imperfections, incorporating sudden, unforeseen and violent rupture in the once reliable order of things. The obsessive engagement was indeed a cathartic vision of abstraction and dematerialization, that released forever the inevitable fear of the perishable body/matter.