Exactly a year ago, Galerie 88 had held an exhibition of Arun Ganguly’s photographs to celebrate the centenary of the sculptor, Meera Mukherjee (1923- 1998), and the collaborative art she participated in. Mukherjee had set up a makeshift foundry at Elachi and Nolgorhat, villages on the southeastern peripheries of Calcutta, to cast her sculptures. In these villages, the sculptor inspired local Muslim women to give expression to their creative impulses by producing hand-stitched kanthas — an ageold craft — with pictorial motifs based on the paintings of children from their own underprivileged community.

Mukherjee’s partner, Nirmal Sengupta, called these soft quilts recycled from old, discarded sarees “stitched paintings”, and these were on display at Galerie 88’s exhibition of the same name held from May 12 to July 15. The contents of this exhibition — products of Mukherjee, children and women working in synergy with one another — were similar to an earlier show held by another gallery to honour the sculptor. So if the feeling of déjà vu was strong, viewers weren’t to blame.

The contents of both shows of stitched paintings were quite the same. Both exhibitions had another thing in common — they were conceptualised by Adip Dutta. Sadly, none of these three shows exhibited any of Mukherjee’s sculptures.

On one wall of Galerie 88, Mukherjee was quoted as having said: “Three grades of people worked together in an interplay of ideas and forms — children who brought in their ideas expressed on paper, the girls, who stitched them in the kantha idiom, and myself whose ideas were formed on the base of their work. It was as if I was painting with colours which were alive or weaving in which every strand of thread was the emotion of a child.”

Galerie 88 also displayed digital copies of the children’s paintings. They had mostly painted themselves at play. Although running stitches are used in both, these stitched paintings are quite different from traditional kanthas. The women had no time for decorative motifs and they fell back on their own lives and back-breaking work for inspiration. They used backgrounds of variegated colours — blue, purple, black, viridian and pink — and depicted themselves in the fields, sowing paddy in the torrential rain and tending to their children and cattle. Busy smithies. People go to the market carrying baskets on their head. Some protect themselves from the rain with umbrellas or by wearing the wide-brimmed palm leaf toka.

Homely details of everyday life are charmingly presented. Inside a hut with a tiled roof, a woman puts her child to bed. Women and children weave baskets. In an uncommon work (picture, left) with a salmon pink background, a vivid green tree of life diagonally dominates the frame. Children pluck its bright red flowers and sway from its slender branches while life goes on as usual beneath it. The most animated work is a depiction of Teachers’ Day celebrations in a school (picture, right). With its mauve background, the playing field explodes with joy as the children have fun.

Stitching was not a chore for the women. It was a source of happiness. Emulating them, a carpet weaver, Abu Taher, had made a carpet. But the traditional floral motifs on the carpet’s border looked awkward next to the quaint figures borrowed from kanthas woven in the centre.