Paper Tigress

Call it serendipity or what you will…. A name that crops up at work and is researched extensively makes me rewind to the last Independence Day when the bright Google Doodle had caught my eye.

- Shraddha Jahagirdar-Saxena

The creation showed the Parliament House in saffron, the Ashoka Chakra, flanked by two peacocks, India’s national birds, in shades of blue and green. I remember noticing that this form had been intricately quilled.

I swiftly find the Mumbai-based artist Sabeena Karnik’s work online and spend some time browsing through it on several platforms. In a leisurely fashion, I zoom in and out of the images of her intricate and colourful works, making mental notes on how paper has been lovingly shaped to create different forms that represent letters, sayings, monuments, brand logos and more. Just recently, on creating the letter S in the shape of a swan for the @36daysoftype on social media, Sabeena had been described by that artistic community thus: ‘a true master in her own style and technique…. Her amazing works are all handmade, and made by playing with the organic forms of the material and with a vibrant colour palette, to create illustrations that stand out for their complexity and their delicacy. A style that has made this paper artist from Mumbai internationally known….’

Having read about a hedgehog’s prickly quills and a writer’s elegant quill, I dive into the creative world of an artist who shapes paper to her will, bending it to the sway of her imagination. I learn more about quilling, the art form that is also known as paper filigree. It has been chronicled how during the Renaissance, nuns and monks would roll gold-gilded paper remnants trimmed during the bookmaking process, and use them — as a substitute for costly gold filigree — to beautify religious objects. It later became a polite pastime of young ladies in 18th- and 19thcentury England. The practice is supposed to have spread across the Atlantic with the colonisers, who used it to embellish their home decorations.