India
Hello, I'm Priya
Sharma
I am a block printer from Jaipur. My blocks are hand-carved from teak in Sanganer village, the same way they have been for three hundred years. Silk rewards that precision.
From the desert city of Jaipur, Priya Sharma is a master of traditional block printing and natural indigo dyeing. Drawing her visual language from the painted havelis of Shekhawati and the geometric lattices of Jaipur's palaces, her work carries the sensory richness of a desert that is somehow also the most colorful place on earth.
In Sanganer, block printing is so old that no one can remember when it started. My family has been carving teak wood blocks for six generations. We have blocks older than my great-great-grandfather that we still use. The difference between a Sanganer block and a kelaghayi galib is the resist logic. In Sanganer, we print the colour. In Shaki, they print the absence of colour — paraffin where the dye must not go. The same wooden stamp, an inverted philosophy. I spent a week relearning everything I know from this inverted position. I carved a Jaipur palace jali pattern — the geometric lattice from the windows of the Hawa Mahal — as a paraffin-resist galib. The lines I had been carving for colour suddenly became lines carved against colour. The first time I tested it on silk with Narmin’s pomegranate dye recipe, the pattern appeared in reverse — pale geometry on dark ground. I had been looking at this pattern on palace walls my whole life and never seen it this way. The galib gave me new eyes for something six hundred years old.
— Priya Sharma, Jaipur, India
The motif
Hawa Mahal jali — Rajput stone lattice
Jaipur, India · Hawa Mahal · 18th century
Dyed by hand in Shaki, Azerbaijan
Collections by Priya Sharma
The Rajasthan Collection
Block printing with natural dyes · 22 pieces
22 pieces
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