Photography: Philip Sinden
Creating a work for the National Gallery of Victoria’s annual collaboration with Mecca celebrating women in design was an unexpectedly transformative process for Nipa Doshi. “It came at just the right time for me,” says the East London-based, Mumbai-born designer who, with partner Jonathan Levien, opened award-winning design studio Doshi Levien in 2000. “I wanted to do work that embodied my values as a human being and as a woman. When you’re working in a very Eurocentric, masculine design environment, there isn’t always room to express women’s histories and stories.”
That’s just what she did with A Room of My Own, her work for the Mecca x NGV Women in Design Commission, currently on display at the NGV. Functioning as both a dressing table and a kind of shrine, it’s a cabinet in wood, lacquer and glass that opens to reveal a mirror on one side, and Doshi’s own abstract paintings of women who’ve inspired her on the other. “It was a commission very focused on women and the voices of women, so I wanted to create something very personal,” Doshi explains. “I saw it as an opportunity to be maximum me. And I wanted to tell a story rooted in my memories of all the women in my life, and the rituals I grew up with.”
Those women include her mother’s friends and relatives, who gathered every afternoon to talk about their lives and support each other; her aunt Maya, who not only ran a textile workshop that supplied houses including Issey Miyake and Hermès, but also founded two NGOs supporting women, all while working as a chartered accountant; Nina, an architect friend who supported Doshi during a stay in hospital; Zeenat Aman, a convention-defying 1970s Bollywood actress; and finally, a self-portrait. “It’s a first for me that my paintings are part of a collection – I’m hugely honoured,” says Doshi, whose daily drawing practice serves as meditation, as visual research and as a problem-solving process. “It’s a pivotal moment for me as a person, this commission. I feel emboldened and I feel fearless.”
Despite the confidence the commission has given her, Doshi is careful to credit others. “My partner, Jonathan, was very much part of the cabinet’s development,” she says. “He was a collaborator, especially when it came to resolving the aesthetic and technical details.” The pair mixed the coloured lacquers in their colour library, while the cabinet itself was made in France by Atelier Helbecque. That assistance isn’t always an unmixed blessing, however. “Often I’m written out of books about women and design because I work with a man, so I appreciate this support and encouragement to say, ‘This is my voice and I want to use it.’”
That encouragement also enabled her to lean into beauty for this commission: beauty in the diversity of her inspirations; beauty as an attribute of the object itself; and beauty as one of its functions. “The cabinet is multifaceted, like women,” explains Doshi. “It’s a shrine and it’s a dressing table – to look after your body, and celebrate the ritual of getting ready, is important.” This conflation of beauty with spirituality was a deliberate move on Doshi’s part: “Beauty is highly underrated and dismissed in design because it is considered to be feminine and decorative and superficial, but I think that beauty is an inherent human need.”
Beauty emporium Mecca, whose M-POWER grant program supported this commission, would doubtless agree. And so will delighted gallery-goers, who get to experience not only this exhibition, but also the initiative’s longer-term legacy of supporting women in design.
Nipa Doshi: doshilevien.com
NGV: ngv.vic.gov.au
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