Maya Jaal
Vandana
2010
2D Multiples 15x15cm each
Thread on Velvet Paper
©Vandana The Artist
Courtesy of the Artist
DESCRIPTION
Maya Jaal is a sequence of ten works on velvet paper, each building on the last. A spider web, constructed with brown thread, grows progressively from the first piece to the tenth — beginning as a few strands and expanding until, in the final piece, a spider appears at its centre. The web is Maya Jaal — the illusion trap. It represents the paradigm, belief system, and collective consciousness in which a human being gradually becomes ensnared: the social conditioning, the inherited structures, the assumptions about who we are — growing around us thread by thread, so slowly that we forget they are there. The spider at the centre is the one who built the trap and is now caught in it. In reality, once a spider completes its web, it gets trapped in it and dies — the creator consumed by its own creation. The work addresses the condition of living inside an illusion of one’s own making, where the real identity is buried beneath the web.
Vandana 