Creating art out of discards
Medha Bhatt is a Textile Designer by training, artist and advocate of zero waste, craft researcher and maths tutor by passion. She is an alumna of National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Medha is the founder of design studio “First Forest” that creates upcycled art and craft products from household and tailor discards and develops innovative green solutions towards zero waste. Her interests range from expressing socio-ecological issues through art to initiating “The Bug Club” for children to create awareness about natural history and environment. Medha had been part of Pattanam Archaeological Excavations in 2012. A recipient of the INTACH-UK Project Grant in 2013, she has presented her ethnographic research on trade beads and bead-work of Gujarat at the British Museum, London in 2012; the Textile Society of America Symposium in Savannah, Georgia in 2016 and Vancouver, Canada in 2018.
Journey in design for Medha began with working for Kutch’s Mahila Vikas Sangathan in 1999 which sowed the seeds of ‘sustainable living’ in her. She was associated with an organisation called ‘Thanal’ in Kerala whose objective was to boost the local economy by producing products out of local waste. “Vismaya Patchwork Group” emerged under Thanal where under Medhas’s guidance six women tailors were trained to work with discarded bits of cloth to create patterns. This exercise helped these women earn ten to fifteen times more. The Thanal Kumbalangi Conference held in 2005 was the first rice campaign on organic rice farming. Medha and her team had curated a poster for the event named “Save Our Rice” depicting the degradation of the local ecosystem and agriculture due to construction of dams.
In 2011 Medha started the ‘First Forest’ where she began exploring the idea of creating art out of discards and developing functional products. Through First Forest she worked to normalise design for all economic strata of society as well as supporting people’s movements and campaigns through the products. Her interest in environmental issues is reflected in the use of motifs of ‘birds’, ‘leaves’, ‘wings’ and other natural elements in her works like ‘Five Ferns of the Himalayas’, ‘Lily Pond’, ‘Six Trees, Six Cities’.
Medha had set up “Bug Club of the Forest Floor” in Trivandrum in 2014 where she interacted with children every Saturday to discuss various aspects of Nature. She started a campaign called “Trash Your Trash” with Film and Video Students at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad in 2018 which helped in reducing waste in the campus by forty percent. Medha has been involved in a self-funded research of beadwork of Kathiawadi community. Her area of interest is how mathematics played an important role in the propagation of an art where women were illiterate. Since multiples of three beads were used to create beadwork, Medha finds this research necessary to preserve as well as to propagate the art. She has worked as a Research Consultant for reviving the traditional Bead Jewellery of Rathwa Community of Chota Udaipur at Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, Tejgarh.