Meet Medha Bhatt, Advocating For Environment Through The Art Of 'Applique'

"The whole consumption pattern has changed drastically in the last few decades because we want to buy more. It is like saying - buy two shampoo bottles and get one for free. Even though you need just one, you will end up buying three. That is the kind of dynamics we live in," says 45-year-old artist and advocate of zero waste, Medha Bhatt from Vadodara. Medha believes that because of overconsumption, we are creating excessive waste. And Medha is trying to utilise some of the waste, specifically textile waste by threading magic into unwanted, discarded pieces of cloth.

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As we sit with Medha, we look at her painstakingly bringing a bird to life. Made out of patchwork of discarded fabric material, different colors, textures, and prints, all come together one stitch at a time. Medha is a trained designer who has been threading her journey by advocating zero waste and making art with fabric discards.

Recalling her journey, Medha said,

I joined the National Institute of Design (NID) after class 12 and that was in 1995. At the end of academic education, we are expected to do a graduation project and I did that with Kutch Mahila Vikas Sanghatan. I was documenting the applique textiles of Rajput communities. The research involved going from village to village, collecting and documenting old textiles of applique.

On the first day of her thesis project, when Medha felt thirsty and entered one of the houses, a small hut, she saw a beautiful wall hanging which had colorful trees - red, blue, yellow, and green blasting out the colours.

I saw each house had such wall hangings.

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The idea of using Applique technique had already come into Medha's visual language. In 2004 she headed to Trivandrum in Kerela and the time spent here became Medha's transformative years where her art was no longer just art but became a way of telling stories.

When I went to work with Zero Waste, it was not just ‘discard' but there were so many things around it which I did not realise till I started interacting with the heads of the organisation which was a group of environmentalists. These were people who were already looking at climate change as a big-big issue to talk about.

The environmentalist there mentored Medha in understanding the impact of discards on the environment.

The environment is central to Medha's work - whether the environment she works to protect or the environment she seeks to portray.

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Evolution of Medha's Art 

Observing nature and understanding the deep relationship between humans and the world of trees and birds, mountains and rivers, Medha decided to bring nature into her work. She said,

I was also going on these forest walks with all my environmentalist friends and I was slowly hearing about 'oh, the bird counts are coming down'. The Silent Valley, a pristine evergreen forest, is now drying up slowly, a lot of forest fires are happening and everything was being connected to climate change. I was seeing a whole world of birds there. There was a very beautiful bird there called – Whistling Schoolboy. And, being a person with art and fabric discards, I said, such a beautiful call. How does the bird look? When I saw the picture, I said, let me do this in the fabric.

The beautiful environment attracted Medha and made her illustrate it in the art using fabric discards. But, it was also about choosing the right colours. She added,

Which blue? The bird Malabar Whistling Thrush has a beautiful blue but to get the right blue which only the discards could give me. That is when I started looking at discards not just as material but as a medium to tell stories. And that is where this medium of storytelling related to the environment really struck the cord. Water is blue is blue. But when I am talking about a stream which is not poisoned and a stream which has affluence in it, what is the kind of blue I will use? So, that language was given by discards.

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The colour palette of the environment and the changes it was undergoing transformed Medha's thinking about how she selects discards and applies them. She added,

What is the meaning I am giving and that's where clothes with a conscience come in. I think every fabric has its conscience, every scrap has its conscience. You have discarded it but it gets resurrected when you give that meaning to it.

It can take Medha hours, days even, to look for the right color and the right fabric from the bag of fabric scraps she has collected from nearby tailor shops and sometimes from neighboring homes.

Talking about the fabric waste and the hint of "culture" in them, Medha said,

These sacks have come from nearby tailors so I know what people wear here. It has a lot of reds and very bright colors. Since it is Gujurat, a lot of people wear block prints. So, I have block prints, and also machine-printed textiles. But slowly, there is synthetic also. I mean I would say 50 per cent synthetic or more. And then I have some pieces of cotton. This sack has old clothes also.

Some scarps are nearly 20 years old because Medha's mother has been storing them. From Khadi to embroidered fabric, one will find everything in it. Medha added,

You will find our school uniform scraps. We just don't throw them away. You will find our own personal stories in them.

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Looking at the delicate form of the work Medha does - from creating the storyboard on paper to cutting the leaves and patterns, running a stitch through them - using discarded material in her work is what is called, the ‘end of the pipe solution'. But in her classroom at the National Institute of Design, she teaches her students how to change the perspective around consumption itself.

She said,

I am really questioning this whole act of discarding before even looking at the end of the pipe solution of what will I do with this discard. When you discard a banana peel, you know it will become soil in 10 days but when you are looking at a pair of jeans, it takes 10,000 liters of water.

Medha believes it is just a conscious act of thinking about the people and the system that has gone into making a pair of clothes. She added,

If you value that system then you will think twice before discarding.

For Medha this is simple math – either you look at how much you buy or you figure out how are you going to discard, a responsible way of loving and living with the planet. Her art reflects the gentle manner in which this intimate relationship can be formed without having to shout one's intentions from a rooftop. This is just about practicing conscious thinking, "What will happen when I discard?"

While signing off, Medha said,

It is the thinking that will have to change which will trickle down to every other aspect of what you do.

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