Oceans, Kisses, and Tears

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Though the women of the Indian diaspora that motivate so much of Suchitra Mattai’s career are invisible and unnamed in Oceans, Kisses, and Tears, their presence is nonetheless palpable and immediate through an elegant combination of the artwork’s title and materials. The work features a swath of Mattai’s signature weaving of vintage saris, surrounded by a white bed frame and augmented with additional found objects—dollhouse furniture, hair curlers, hanging tassels, and a bell suspended at the top of the work. The waves of saris provide a background texture, suggesting the titular ocean that fills the distance between migrants and their families and homelands. It also offers a mental landscape, where meaningful objects float and intermingle. The dollhouse furniture may suggest domestic work, with its diminutive size indicating a feeling of being diminished by menial tasks, and a feeling of smallness within a wider world. Within this interpretation, the bell perhaps represents a call to service from a master or mistress. The dollhouse objects might also represent a young woman’s contemplation of the family she was born into, as well as her imagination of a home that she might create and of domesticity that she could maintain under her own control. The hair curlers and the saris themselves seemingly point to self-possession, the maintenance of dignity, and the continuation of cultural practices of dress and appearance, all of which provide defense against the powerlessness that comes with servitude and displacement. The bed frame may yield another reference to domestic work, but it might also offer a further indication of mental space—of the objects and associations throughout the work being contained within a dream, or within the contemplations that come before sleep. One might expect to find the title’s kisses and tears in a bed of this kind, where a woman in a foreign land finds the time and space to sort through her experiences and concerns after being bid goodnight. Amid these various possibilities, Oceans, Kisses, and Tears offers an abstracted, conceptual, and non-specific portrait of an imagined woman, but it clearly suggests her presence through a delicate and tender approach.