TREE MATTERS

The Bhil people of Central India are amongst the country’s oldest indigenous communities. To them, the natural world is not ‘a thing apart’, but exists in a seamless relationship to their home and the everyday.

Gangu Bai, Bhil artist, explores this relationship through her mem- ories and paintings of food, work, festivals, illness, medicine…Her tales centre round trees, and so each of her memories has a tree as its focus. Illustrated in vivid and cheerful colours, the paintings in this book foreground a universe of brightly coloured dots, lines and shapes that encompasses all living beings, big and small and wise and wonderful.