At InKo Centre, women printmakers from South India reflect on memory and inheritance

There is something at once familiar and deeply powerful about being in a space dominated by women artists. It feels like an unearthing of unspoken voices, of memories and inheritance that have shaped civilisations, histories, and narratives.

In artist Champa Sharath’s Continued Harmony, one is transported to a paati’s home; to the stillness of early mornings when she would rise to draw the day’s kolam. 

Champa Sharath’s artwork series Continued Harmony
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Champa is among the 10 women artists featured in Inheritance: Memory and Matter at the InKo Centre, an exhibition that brings together female voices from across South India. Working through the medium of printmaking, the artists explore spiritual, emotional, and material threads that bind the past and present, tracing how they find form in the future. 

“I spent every vacation at my grandmother’s home, where she first taught me to draw small rangolis —  and over time, the interest grew. What I love about rangolis is how they belong to everyone; it’s a shared, collective practice with no sense of ownership. In South India, it’s a deeply matrilineal tradition, passed from one generation of women to the next,” says Champa, who uses the woodcut technique of printmaking to create her artwork. 

Gouri Vemula’s untiled work
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Like woodcut, the exhibition also explores myriad techniques of printmaking. In artist Gouri Vemula’s work, she uses the drypoint technique, in which she scratches the design directly into the clayboard with a sharp tool. The incised lines that hold the ink give the final print its characteristic blurriness. In her series, the forms appear hybrid — part human, part animal — with a sculptural torso, textured like scales, and a flowing, almost aquatic lower half that unfurls into sweeping, feather-like extensions. “I began noticing how we compare human behaviour with animals, and it reminded me of the stories my grandmother used to tell us. She would read to us tales from the Panchatantra, where animals speak and think like humans. I would imagine them not as animals, but as human-like beings,” says Gouri. 

The exhibition, in part, draws from curator Lina Vincent’s essay, Women’s Voices-Stories of Printmaking South India, which was published in Chihna, a bilingual publication of art by the Gauhati Artists Guild, in 2025.

“People often misunderstand printmaking, assuming it’s just reproduction, especially with the confusion around offset and digital printing. What they don’t realise is that these are original works, created by the artist in editions from a single matrix. Because of this lack of awareness, many printmakers move away from the medium to painting. In my research, I have also found that many women artists have stepped away from printmaking, with only a few continuing to engage deeply with the medium,” says curator Lina. 

 Dimple B Shah’s artwork series titled Fragments of the Past
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Dimple B Shah’s artwork series titled Fragments of the Past, has two pieces that depict traditional Indian blouses worn by women during the British era. The works examine women’s identity as something shaped by history, environment, and lived experience. “The women back then had an exposure to the Western lifestyle, especially among the elite, who were influenced by Western aesthetics through education. At the same time, these were also women who led change, contributing to legislation and the fight for equality. While their voices are important, they largely came from an upper-class background that shaped the way they choose to dress,” says Dimple, who uses woodcut and hand-stitched embroidery on rice paper and cloth. 

Neejina Neelambaran’s series titled Thousand and One Nights
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Artist Premalatha Seshadri uses etching on zinc plates. The artworks present an interplay of line, texture, and symbolic form, rendered in an earthy palette. Figures and motifs arrive through abstract forms with elongated bodies and mask-like figurines.

While most printworks draw on some form of colour, artist Neejina Neelambaran’s works have an interesting take; two of her works from the series Thousand and One Nights are stripped of colour and reduced to stark contrasts where form, shadow, and silence speak louder than the pigment. Made wth inkless embossed print, a closer look reveals a looping line of knotted mass, perhaps memory itself unravelling. “My work normally tries to transmit the density of our shared baggage into a new liberated dimension,” says Neejina. 

Together, the exhibition resists neat conclusions; instead, they unfold like inherited stories themselves, layered, incomplete, and continuously evolving.

Inheritance: Memory and Matter is on at Inko Centre, Adyar Club Gate Road, R.A. Puram till April 18. Entry is free.

Published – April 01, 2026 04:43 pm IST