Stella Maris Fine Arts alumni present concept-driven show in Chennai

The gallery at Chennai’s Lalit Kala Akademi hums like an unruly classroom at 11am. Voices overlapping, footsteps echoing, instructions cutting through the air. The environment feels apt since the space is currently hosting The Art of Becoming: Stella(r) Alumni Canvas, a coming-together of 20 artists shaped by the Department of Fine Arts at Stella Maris College.

Some are adding final touches to their installations, making sure the sculptures are sitting right, writing notes and instructions on how to view the works best.  At the centre of it all is curator Ashrafi S Bhagat, once their professor, now an art historian and critic, moving from work to work with a measured eye. The classroom may be decades behind them, but the discipline remains.

“I conceived this exhibition around two interconnected ideas — the mystique of the ocean and the fragility of time and space,” says Ashrafi. “Both are powerful, enigmatic, and ever-changing. Nothing stands still. If you look at fragility of time and space, for me it is memory; time plus the space it occupies in your mind. And that same fragility exists in the ocean’s ecosphere. It is weathered, altered, sometimes consciously degraded. Both are aspects of life that are constantly in flux.” 

The result is not thematic uniformity, but divergence within a shared framework. Some artists have immersed themselves in both concepts; others have anchored themselves firmly in one.

For Thejomaye Menon, also one of the organisers of the exhibition, the ocean becomes energy in motion. Long associated with a personalised figurative language, she has consciously stepped into abstraction to explore force rather than form. In this series, currents surge across the canvas in layered chromatic fields, circular movements echoing both tidal rhythm and planetary orbit. “I’ve worked on the depth below the sea and connected it to the universe. When we speak of the fragility of time, I feel it is determined by planetary change. The planets influence movement. We may not fully understand it, but time shifts with these forces. It’s a mystery,” she says. 

“Each of these paintings took about three months,” says Preetha Kannan, standing before a canvas layered in dots of blues and greens. To understand the intricate details in each painting, she presents the viewer with a magnifying glass. Having stepped away from painting to pursue volunteer work in Chennai and later with Baba Amte in rural India for environmental and social causes, Preetha returned to art with sharpened environmental urgency.

In her paintings, she depicts scenes beneath the surface of the ocean. Metal, plastic, bullets and other debris gathers while marine life appears to adapt around what humanity leaves behind. The ocean, here, is not mystic spectacle. It is an archive holding evidence of war, waste and survival. 

Shalini Biswajit on the other hand, approaches the fragility of time as a spiritual urgency. Drawing from years of studying scripture, particularly Vedantic thought, her work centres on what she calls “inner leisure”, which is a state of stillness that withstands the inevitable highs and lows of life. On canvas, that appears as measured squares in muted ochres and blues. Installed alongside are metal figures of a man and a woman on two sides of the same metal sculpture. “In the time span we are given, we must prioritise the very reason we have this human birth. You don’t know what will happen tomorrow. There is an urgency in recognising that,” she says. 

For Ashrafi, the exhibition is less about nostalgia and more about continuity. The artists may differ in language and medium, but the intellectual rigour remains visible. “I don’t allow homogeneity,” she says with a smile. “I wanted individuality. The styles, the techniques, the expressions must reflect their own sensibility.”

The Art of Becoming: Stella(r) Alumni Canvas is on from February 11 to 16, 11am to 7pm at Lalit Kala Academi