Puja Khanna Duggal came to painting by a winding road. Born in New Delhi in 1978, she majored in Fine Arts at school and then read English Literature at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi. There followed a career of some twenty-five years in design, textile embroidery and Indian crafts, including prominent fashion houses. The disruptions of the pandemic returned her to the canvas. Since reviving her practice in 2021, she has built a remarkable body of work that fuses painting with the embroidery and appliqué she knows so intimately. Oil, acrylic and oil pastel are laid down first. Over them she stitches silk and cotton threads, raffia, beads, sequins and recycled leather, so that each work becomes part painting, part tapestry. The two speeds are deliberate: as she puts it, "The paint moves fast. The thread does not." Her subject is myth, though never as doctrine. Garuda, Sekhmet, Amaterasu, Kannon and Antaeus all appear, and Hindu, Egyptian, Japanese and Greek deities and guardians mingle freely. For Duggal these sources are "costume for something that was already alive in me before it had a name." She builds her figures as fractures rather than smooth outlines, assembled "the way a dream is remembered the morning after." They slip readily between human, creature, plant and architecture. Across The Secret Parade, A Procession of Light and Shape Shifters, the divine feminine is a constant presence. Most striking is the primordial Mother, "a protector who subdues ego and ignorance simply by refusing to move." Here Duggal finds kinship in the collection with Gogi Saroj Pal, whose mythological heroines likewise reimagined female strength. The hours of hand-stitching, however, lend Duggal's goddesses a tactile, devotional slowness all their own. In her words, "Every creature is mine. The myths only lent the clothes."
