stir x bombay sapphire

x AISHWARYA SHETTY

Stir Creativity x Bombay Sapphire

STIR, in collaboration with Bombay Sapphire, launched a unique contest. The objective was to raise funds by offering selected works to be acquired by art enthusiasts, proceeds of which would be donated to support the underprivileged sections of the society that is particularly impacted due to the repercussions of the lockdown. Entries were invited from all possible creative disciplines. There was no overarching conceptual thematic forced. The only constraint was to link the creation with “twenty-one” – strokes, words, lines, or dots. And this is no magic number really! It is the number of days the lockdown was initially announced for in the country. It was a first for most of us to experience a global shutdown of this scale, layered with associated ambiguity and insecurities. The challenges of having limited access to material and equipment, in some cases no access to studio space meant pushing the boundaries.

Concept

Aishwarya Shetty took this exercise as an opportunity to combine architecture – her education and profession and illustration – her personal interest. Conceptually, the work is reflective of our contemporary times. “With the COVID-19 quarantine, it feels like everybody I knew felt trapped in a space but lost at the same time. That feeling of confinement and being ‘blue’ was what I wanted to capture through this piece,” she explains. And the very idea of 21 posed lots of possibilities for Shetty. Her work titled 21 different stories, 21 spaces away looked at people in their proverbial glass-homes. She captured … “the oddly chaotic yet soothing sectional view of a typical Bombay building…”.