During the lockdown Anuradha Bhaumick made her passion a full-time reality, turning people’s photographs into beautiful embroidery. Her work has found fans all around the world including Hollywood actor Emma Roberts.
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00:00My work was shared by Belletrist, which is Emma Roberts' book club.
00:04And after that, I had at least 30 people asking me to buy my work.
00:30The scenes I want embroidered are mostly actual people, real people who I meet, and real people
00:42who want to get their selves commissioned, embroidered by me.
00:46So that's a really nice process because there's so many people who reach out to me via DMs
00:51and they're like, you know, Anuradha, can you make me reading?
00:54Can you make my kid?
00:56Can you make my mother-in-law?
00:57I have a huge bookshelf, I have a record player.
01:02My inspiration is real people, like something I've made over here.
01:06As you can see, this is a real person.
01:09She is an artist based in Maharashtra and she has a cat.
01:13So you can see there's a cat tail over here and she likes Gustav Klimt's paintings.
01:19So these are two of his paintings over here.
01:22Also she herself does a lot of anatomy based art.
01:25So I've made some body vases over here and a lot of indoor plants.
01:30So yeah, I like capturing real people in their real homes.
01:34Obviously, I like to give them something which is more what they want from their heart and
01:39not what they're living in right now.
01:41I like to create this whole ideal kind of a situation, lush foliage, a lot of...
01:46The whole point of my art is to elevate the mundane with the monotony itself.
01:50And I think that's what I do.
01:56It was actually when I had gotten chicken pox and my mom had to, you know, find a way,
02:02an innovative way to keep me inside the house.
02:04So she gave me a handkerchief, a rumal and she taught me lazy daisy and running stitch.
02:11And she was like, you know, you do this, you stay at home.
02:14And I didn't realize that this is the best thing I've ever learned.
02:25It's helped me a lot during the lockdown because you have to stay put, you have to
02:39stay at home.
02:40There's no way you can go out or actually, I'm a very social person.
02:44I like to be around my friends.
02:45I like to go to the brewery.
02:47But yeah, we cannot do that.
02:50So embroidery has kept me busy through all these eight months.
02:56It's actually a very remedy art form for me, more than anything else.
03:05Even if I don't get money for it, I think I'm going to always do it because it helps
03:09me so much keeping myself calm, keeping myself aware, keeping myself sensitized, humanized.
03:16I think embroidery is a great remedy art form.
03:24The best part of embroidery has to be that you know, you put in so many hours of work
03:30to it.
03:31There's never an easy or a shortcut way to do embroidery, you have to go the long way.
03:37And it gives you every day it gives you a different side of it.
03:41And sometimes I would like to say that you never know what's actually going to happen
03:44in the end because of how your stitch takes form.
03:48Every stitch is unique.
03:50You can never do it again.
03:53You cannot replicate your hand movements again and again.
03:57So yeah, that would be the most beautiful thing about it that every hand movement is
04:02different.
04:03Everything is unique.
04:04And that's what gives it gives embroidery its beauty that you can there can never be
04:10two of it.
04:11It's always one of one.
04:23Recently an international gallery called PXP Contemporary asked me to curate a line
04:29make an entirely new line for them and around 70% of it is sold out.