Nurturing Walls

Animal Art by Meena Women Madan Meena with Gita Wolf Nurturing Walls focuses on the favourite Meena theme of animals and their young, featuring a striking collection of living art from the walls of Meena tribal homes in Rajasthan, known as Mandana. Mandana motifs are inseparable from everyday life as women paint the mud walls and floors of their homes regularly, keeping time with recurring festivals and changing seasons. Mothers teach their daughters how to paint, and this tradition has been passed along generation after generation. This teeming world of baby animals and their mothers has been carefully recreated here as a series of silkscreen prints, on textured brown paper recreating the feel of mud walls. The lives of the artists behind this little known art is just as fascinating, and full colour inserts capture this richness, making the form of this book as unusual as the art it recreates. Of appeal to artists, anthropologists and women’s studies enthusiasts, Nurturing Walls pays tribute to the female imagination, sustained by these everyday acts of nurturance. An exhibition in London that featured selected art prints from the book was opened by the writer and art critic John Berger. (Watch the video)