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Anshula Tayal | Episode 1212
Anshula Tayal is a Portland-based ceramic artist creating functional pottery for everyday use, with each piece serving as a canvas for storytelling. Inspired by Indian art and architecture, textile traditions, and regional folk forms, her wheel-thrown and hand-built work explores surface decoration as a way to share cultural narratives.
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You’re about to start a new body of work about impoverment. When you start a new piece, does the story already exist, or are you still waiting for the fullness of the story to be revealed.
So this series of work, I have done it on as a print making project. It’s a print making series on women called the Shakti series. I am trying to get my design and how I create on tiles first. I am creating tiles and then start incorporating them into 3D work. Then I’m going to work on how the colors will work, how the process to get those 2D designs onto my tiles first, and then work on the 3d.
From your perspective, what is unique about a woman’s impoverishment versus a man’s impoverishment?
No, it’s equally. It’s the same. It’s both important, equally important. It’s just that as a woman, I’ve interacted with multiple women of all different age levels, plus culturally, different culture, different cultural levels. And the women… do need a little push right now? Yes, they empower themselves and help them a little.
How much of the story is going to be overt versus interpretive?
I am not a very interpretive artist. It’s very direct, it’s focused. So that is how it is going to be. I give it out. These are the tools that you require to be empowered. And I’ll just that.
One of the things that I noticed about your work is that it’s so beautiful, like all your work is so beautiful, and yet, if you’re going to be telling a story about impoverishment, and I’m wondering, how do you tell a story that’s that is so difficult and yet still have beauty in the work?
Sometimes simple messages can be easily explained in art. I’ll give an example of the print that I have already have done that: There’s a painting by Frida Kahlo where she has her husband, Diego, on the forehead, and she’s thinking about him, and she’s in pain, and she’s shown thorns and tears flowing through her eyes, and she’s in pain. Whereas my take was that if you think of yourself… so I have a I have a print where there’s a the woman, she has herself on her head. She’s thinking of herself first, and she’s happy. So just a simple, simple thing that you think of. Yourself. Also, you don’t always think about somebody else, and that’ll make you happy. A simple drawing, but it does convey the message to think about yourself.
I know you have a series that’s coming up where you’re going to be building pottery while building stories. When you’re building multiple pieces, do you see them as individual stories or chapters in the larger narrative?
Individual stories or a chapter of memories. This could be interpreted any way you want.
Book
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Contact
Instagram: @anshulatayal