Lavanya Mani

Lavanya Mani earned her MFA in creative painting from The Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda in 2001, and began incorporating elements of textile dyeing, printing, and embroidery into her work. As she worked with cloth, she gravitated towards traditional Indian dyeing and printing processes such as kalamkari, which shares similarities with painting. However, using a "traditional" or "craft" medium as a contemporary art practice required an understanding of its context within the larger historical and cultural dynamic.

Mani's work aims to explore the multifaceted role that dyed and printed textiles played in the history of colonial trade, the establishment of colonialism, and the economics of political dominion and imperialism in India. She also draws attention to the historical period when "high art" and "craft" were categorized as opposites that needed to be defined against each other to legitimize their existence.