Shelly Jyoti reconstructs her encounters with the physical – the body, body embellishments and the sensuous signs and symbols of womanhood. The images are an inward journey, inspired by the dazzling minutiae of adornment, adulation and adoration. She attempts to recapture these transient and ephemeral moments in the finite space of paper.

Her works in pastels, inks, conte, and pencils -strokes achieve the same brilliance of dry pigment on the abrasive ground of paper. The embedded colors reflect light just like a prism. The artist has used the expressive power of colour to capture subtle and bold nuances that arrest the viewer with saturated _expression.

The result is a highly personal and visually impelling interpretation of the fashion plethora, which is her home ground. Shelly Jyoti has been trained in the fashion-system from India’s premier fashion school, and this has grounded her identity and identification with the world without to reveal the world within.

Driven by the desire to give passage to a burning inner instinct, the artist Shelly Jyoti pursues a certain type of signifier that emerges from her fascination for the gaze of the bold and the beautiful and the unquenchable thirst to search for ‘new’ gestures of fashion. These interests collide and converge with her passion for the Arts. The effort is to represent the extensions of the body as being, of the body, which moves through the space and time, in an attempt to adapt to the world. Thus the fashion-system, which she belongs to, becomes existence of the body turned outwards, while the actual body becomes visualization, opening up an interpretive road to exteriority. The body dissolves and instead of garments, the body adorns itself with experience and emotions.

Woman’s beautiful faces, huge expressive eyes, which arrest, spur innocence… linger and take on an existence that tends to fluctuate beyond its own limits. Embroidery and textures of fibre and fabric - the celebration of the tactile, move beyond the frame as they leave behind evocative telltale signs of ageless experience.

Shelly’s practical experience of the craft of adornment redefine the human structure with a unique dimension. Bodily extensions like eyes, long legs, a slim waist… the stereotypical features of fashion, are turned inside to mark a body in withdrawal. The artist struggles with the empty, though haute couture shell, the swirling anesthesia of body-fashion artifice, to an awakening The closed and dark realms of the being are opened to pull the viewer into the space where the diminished body reemerges from the plundered gaze to regain its dignity and distinction.

Colors, reds, blues and yellow predominantly, as signals and as mobile casts of the body, are thrown into the whirling confusion of an all-consuming time. Signs that become clothes hangers, or clothes hangers that become signs, make up an aesthetic chiasmus. Such chiasmus represents the polysemy of fashion, which refuses to be limited to a precise field of factual reality. In this way, Shelly Jyoti opens up to a subtle irony of emotive expressions just like fashion appears for what it is, a way of being and appearing that plays upon signifiers that show fashion as the great intruder in contemporary art.