मरिअंबा MARYIAMBA

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PREFACE

Growing up in a Hindu family in Jamshedpur, Jharkhand I was surrounded with people from different cultures and backgrounds. A Catholic family were our neighbors. I would often visit them and observe the statue of Mother Mary wearing a crown and holding infant Jesus. I would remember having a statue of a woman dressed in red at my house called Durga. I would wonder why one was wearing such simple light-colored clothes and the other one was wearing such bright illuminating clothes. Indeed both had different attires, then if God was one then why did they have different attire, except the crown on their head? That’s when I came to know that one is Mother Mary and the other one is Maa Durga.

CONCEPT BEHIND THE STYLING SHOOT

The shoot is all about creating a look that is an amalgamation of both mother Mary and Maa durga about creating a look based on the contrasting personalities of the figures. It signifies the importance of oneness in a thing. It is about finding similarities in both the supreme figures and creating a single look, (derived from both the figures)

Mother Mary is known as Mariam in Hindi and Maa Durga is Also called Amba in Sanskrit which means mother. So, the name of my character is Mariamba.
Mother Mary is someone who is very calm and composed while Durga is fierce and bold. These two figures are motherly figures and they are someone who we look up to in our bad times. Both the figures are very contrasting to each other but the motherly nature that is associated with both the figures which gave me the opportunity to create oneness out of both and therefore the color palette of the entire look is somewhere that blends well with Mother Mary and Maa Durga too. The hands are soft like Mary and yet red like Durga. She poses like Durga but has a rosary in her hand. She looks bold because of " the Durga eyes" but still has an innocence of Mother Mary.

Crying has often been stigmatized as a form of weakness, Maa Durga is never seen crying but the tears that she is shedding are not weak but precious. Here in the shoot, she is seen crying because even though she is tired of doing good for the world but she will continue to do it because she is the mother and she loves her children, likewise Mother Mary is never seen opening her eyes wide open, but in this shoot, she is seen opening her eyes wide which signifies that she is observing and that whenever anything wrong happens she will be there to protect us and that by doing so I wanted to show a human attribute to the figures.

Drawing the elements of the Durga crown during Durga Puja, and combining it with the aesthetics of the Catholic Mary crown, I constructed the head gear or the crown.

This was a college assignment where in we had to get inspired by art of any kind and style our model accordingly. So i chose the statues of Maa Durga and Mother Mary.