Aksharaya Workshop & Camp: Part II

I wrote about Aksharaya‘s Workshop and Camp here over four months ago with the promise to follow up that short post with a longer more descriptive one ‘very soon’. Even though this is not exactly soon, this is the apt time to share some more about it. Why, you ask – because on Thursday was the launch of the Cordenons Collaborative Calendar 2011, which was based on the artworks we produced at the camp.

Cordenons Collaborative Calendar 2011 and its Launch
The calendar, which was the final product that came out of the camp, featured twelve artworks from twelve designers, featuring different Indian scripts including Devanagari, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Urdu, Gurmukhi and Bengali. Add to that numbers for each month designed to match the adjoining typographic artwork, and the calendar is a complete winner. The highlight of the event for me were the large canvas prints of our artworks and I went as far as publicly declaring my desire to steal my print.

My own artwork (which you can see above) read ghumangheri in Gurmukhi, which means labyrinth. It started off as being in Hindi, and at that stage it read bhoolbhulaiya. This was also the concept I had constructed at the camp. Later, we decided that since Gurmukhi was un-represented, it would be a good idea to translate the design into that. Looking up of lots of Gurmukhi text and letters happened. The best I could do before this project was to stand in front of a Punjabi hoarding, spend five minutes squinting and staring it and then ultimately decipher it. Now, I’m proud to report, I am much better.

Making of the Artwork