When he was growing up, there was one thing that fashion designer Jenjum Gadi loved doing more than anything else—plucking fruit from his mother’s garden, and chomping on them while still sitting on a tree.
There would be fallen fruit lying scattered all over the grass, but he wouldn’t even touch them, Gadi told FE at his debut art show, Apase, which was held recently at Vayu—Design for Living, an art gallery located in New Delhi’s Bikaner House.
Everything about Gadi and his art work screams nostalgia, and he confesses that’s what he aimed for too. Hailing from a small village, Tirbin, located in Arunachal Pradesh’s Lepa Rada district, Gadi grew up under the love and care of his mother.
Having made a mark for himself as a fashion designer (he worked with designer Rohit Bal for a year after college before launching his own fashion label, Jenjum) over the years, when Gadi decided to explore other art forms, he knew instantly that his mother and motherland would be the ones to receive his first tribute.
And so, as Gadi experimented with brass art wares, he was transported back to his mother’s garden. Even the name of his exhibition—Apase—literally translates to ‘assorted fruits’ in Galo, the language of his tribe.
Gadi says, “Where I come from, we believe a lot in slow, natural and organic ways of living. In this collection, I’ve tried to evoke that and create a sensory element to immortalise the memories I have with fruit and vegetables from my childhood home. I wanted to transcend those memories from my heart to something much more tangible, because they are an innate part of me.”
“My fondest memory from my mother’s garden is that when in my village, the adults would go to the big field for farming, all the children would gather in the garden and play around.
We would climb the trees to eat fresh fruit, and jump up and down on them,” he shares.But interestingly, this isn’t the first time that Gadi’s upbringing and background have influenced his work. Intentionally or not, some element of nature has seeped into every fashion collection he’s created, and now his first metal work was wholly inspired by it. Ask him why, and a sigh escapes his lips. “Growing up, there was no technology, nature was my only playground.”
However, even as Gadi worked on his first art collection—which took a total of one-and-a-half years from inception to completion—there was learning involved in the job every day.
“We used a mix of styles, techniques and textures in metal casting to create this collection. Since this was the first time we were using the medium, we created samples for each design before deciding the finishes we wanted,” explains Gadi, who is an alumnus of Wigan & Leigh College, England.
He adds, “It was a challenge to ourselves to toe the line between aiming for perfection and keeping the natural imperfections. But my team of craftsmen and I learned together so that through my vision and their techniques, the viewers can feel connected to our labour of love.”
Going ahead, Gadi is excited to explore other art forms, while also continuing to see what more he can do with brass, and what other stories he can tell through the medium of metals. The limit is beyond even the sky, adds the 42-year-old designer and artist.
