SOUTH SOUTH (SS): For our readers from across different regions who may be being introduced to your work for the first time, how would you describe your approach to art making and the evolution of your practice?

Anju Dodiya (AD): I started with creating a fictional autobiography centered around joy and anxiety, intensified, in domestic spaces. Mythology, literature, cinema and art-history enrich my emotional theatre. Over the years, I have worked with watercolour, painting on fabric, painting on mattresses and played with figuration in abstract constructs.

SS: How do you think about the audience for your work? Does this influence your thematic references or the ways in which you present your work?

AD: I am primarily an image- maker, and I want the viewer to be drawn in, to be gripped by the play of images. The temperature of colour, the hardness of line or the juxtaposition of shapes are attempts at precisely devising a web of interaction for the viewer. I trust her to feel a range of her own emotions. My meaning or narrative needn’t be hers. The references enrich the narrative or kick start the movements, but are not necessary for a private interpretation.

SS: Anatomy of a Flame features a selection of works created over the past two years. Could you share more about your thinking behind these works, perhaps touching on their creation during the pandemic and how this may connect to your images that “revel in the emotional theatre of an inner world”?

AD: My work has always been inward-looking. In fact, I have done a series of work with the idea of an individual as a walled city, creating an enclosure for the self. With the pandemic we found ourselves in real, physical, brutal isolation. Many of the images here, include this feeling. There are masked heads, there is a reader of maps with nowhere to go, there is the warm huddle of families and the desperate melancholy of staying home watching trees or movies.

SS: The figures in your work are often female and drawn from mythologies and autobiographical fictions. How would you describe their presence in your powerful mattress paintings that evoke thoughts of intimacy and the domestic space?

AD: These women could be men. They are aspiring to be heroic. They are caught in the mundane rituals of day to day living but carry the keys to other rooms of the imagination. For instance, I have been interested in transforming Greek heroines to align with my experience. Arachne was the labouring artist; Penelope was the weaver, whose husband travelled; Daphne was entangled in a tree because of misogyny! The subjects of insomnia, dream and longing started the mattress paintings. Later they became pregnant surfaces, where one could explore home and the world.

SS: What was the thinking behind the title for the show and how would you describe the relationships that are formed between the series of works through bringing them together in this show?

AD: Anatomy of a Flame was an abstract reference to the energy within us all, and thinks about the ambiguity of passion. Like a cloud , a flame also has many abstract variants- shapes, densities, tones which connects with the basic instinct of a painter to make stains and marks. Perhaps that act connects all the works. As content, a restless vigor animated the interior lives of all the protagonists, like small unguarded fires.