No one ever told me that kolam is graphic design.
I am an Indian-American visual artist and designer educated in the Eurocentric canon. Kolam has been for generations a daily art, craft, religious, domestic, and social practice of my ancestors, but I didn’t learn that in school. I didn’t learn it in art class, or in my International Baccalaureate Art program, or while earning a B.F.A. in design.
By studying and practicing kolam, I am reclaiming my professional craft not as something I do other than inhabiting my cultural heritage, but as a primary means of inhabiting that heritage. When I put kolam, I experience design not through the lens of white men whose names fill my graphic design textbooks, but through the lens of my maternal ancestors whose creativity and legacy were documented not in textbooks but in the fingers of daughters and granddaughters. As a child, I watched with fascination as my mother held a phone to her ear and doodled on scraps of paper, absentmindedly weaving intricate designs in and out of grids of dots. Putting kolam teaches me that graphic design is my inheritance.
I reclaimed kolam for its connection to my heritage, but it has reclaimed me as a visual designer.
Kolam is made as a sacred offering with edible and organic materials that swiftly return themselves to the land. Kolas are created as offerings to the Earth and its other inhabitants, and are immediately subject to the inevitable fate of a strong breeze or passing footstep. When I make kolam, I am humbled by my inability to control nature, and also my relative power over an individual ant in my path. Kolam is art therapy for perfectionists and egotists. It quietly insists that everything I create is ephemeral, forcing my reckoning with the ecological implications of the materials I choose or recommend to my clients.
Kolas are also highly site-specific, always designed or adapted for the particulars of space and architecture. It is hard for graphic designers of my generation to imagine how we would practice our craft without a computer screen, but kolam defies this definition. It is a whole body activity, including squats, core control, and fine motor skills. Kolam reminds me that I am a real live person, and I create things for other real live people. With real bodies. In a real place.
Further, kolam is deepening my technical craft as a designer and artist. In South Indian culture, it is a daily ritual, deeply integrated into a woman’s routine and the social fabric. Adopting the tradition makes manageable my goal to practice drawing every day, no matter what else is happening. It is scalable to accommodate the time and resources available to me each day. Finally, kolam requires me to draw from a sense of internalized geometry, as my body and fingers glide around the design. This deep intimacy with line, forms, and space is fundamental to the craft of graphic design. Completing a kolam is humbling to attempt and empowering to accomplish.
Putting kolam for me is both personal and public. I make sketches and research in private spaces, but practice in public, urban spaces. My works outdoors engage neighbors and passersby in conversations that allow me to tell my ancestors’ story and my story, and offer us all a glimpse of an alternate way of life.