Artists showcase their ideas of progress in Hyderabad

Artists Ramesh Gorjala, Priti Samyukta, and Pavan Kumar push boundaries by experimenting with new mediums and materials.

To experiment and to elevate are significant elements of an artist’s creative process. They stay inspired by trying a new medium or material or elevating their art practice to create diverse expressions. Artists Ramesh Gorjala, Priti Samyukta and Pavan Kumar known for their signature styles are navigating challenges to create a new dimension.

“When you try something new, the energy brings in enthusiasm,” says Srikalahasti-based contemporary artist Ramesh Gorjala. Known for Kalamkari paintings of mythological characters, he is incorporating coloured glass beads into his works for a new show in 2025.

Ramesh had visited the India Art Fair 2024 in Delhi and was spellbound to see tapestries created with glass beads. He has been visiting Hyderabad for the past six months to learn glass beads craft from a group from Lucknow.

Sourcing different glass beads from Mumbai and discovering how they work and their fragility has been a learning experience. With linen cloth as a canvas, he paints mythological figures and fuses glass beads into them. “After three failed experiments, I understood that beads look good only on big and bold works. ” Earlier he used to finish a painting in 10 days, the new artworks with beads take three months to complete. “It takes a longer time to see the final work but the satisfaction of having created something new is immense.”

“My room resembles a tailor shop littered with pieces of cloth,” says artist Priti Samyukta whose stint as a research scholar forged a new chapter in cloth applique and quilt work. The head of the Department of Painting in Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University (JNAFAU) and a Fulbright Scholar, Priti’s post-doctoral submission proposal, ‘Women in Quilt Art Of the South Gulf Region: An investigation into the contribution to 21st century America’ was based on her interest in Gee’s Bend, a African-American rural community in Alabama in the US known for its quilts.

While researching their art pieces in the US in 2023, the artist, who uses ink and acrylic as medium, collected and tore pieces of fabric from the clothes discarded by her US-based sister and niece. She then hand-stitched these coloured pieces of fabric to create abstracts and figurative works with women and cats as her subjects. Besides her two solo exhibitions in 2024 in Alabama and Illinois State Universities, she held a show in January, 2025 at Eastern Connecticut State University, USA.

Back in Hyderabad, she continues the quilt work and collects pieces of denim and distressed denim and threads to get textures out of it . Although painstaking, she likes to hand-stitch as it is interesting and therapeutic. On the challenges of her new medium, she says, “Drawing and filling colour in them is precise in an acrylic/pen and ink works but in quilt, the cut and stitch is tough due to folding of edges and the output is not as anticipated.”