Bazaars, Bombay locals, dancers, dreams: How does one make 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles? Ask Surabhi Banerjee

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Since she opened store successful 2020, erstwhile the pandemic had conscionable hit, the designer had started to deliberation astir her adjacent steps — a process that emerged successful tandem with her anxiousness and expanding fatigue with screens. That travel led her to solving jigsaw puzzles. “It was astir intolerable to interest astir thing other when I was mislaid successful a puzzle. When doing a peculiarly garish and uninspiring puzzle, though, I realised that excessively often, the artwork gets successful the mode of its meditative qualities,” she says. 

This marked the opening of the architect’s longest occupation yet: figuring retired however to marque her creation solvable.

The frenzied vigor of a Mumbai local, memorialised successful a puzzle. (Credit: Artist)

Piecing things together

Banerjee has worked connected respective projects, and not conscionable backstage commissions — her creation is connected Hershey’s cocoa barroom wrappers, KFC buckets, MUBI and movie festival posters, Naturals crystal pick cups, medium covers and more. So 1 mightiness think, glancing astatine her website, that she’s eased into it. 

But the “hair-rising gargantuan”-ness that she truthful treasured in the solving process lone seemed to intensify erstwhile she archetypal acceptable retired to get her ain puzzle made. “It was 1 of the hardest things I had taken connected successful my life… determination are aggregate fronts that 1 has to beryllium cautious about.”

‘Attakatha’ by Surabhi Banerjee. The puzzle showcases the people euphony and creation of Kerala. (Credit: Artist)

“A batch of wide manufacturing jigsaw puzzle companies I spoke to, successful the beginning, said it was intolerable to get these made the mode I wanted to and successful the prime I wanted them in,” Banerjee recollects.

“In the end, I recovered idiosyncratic who had ne'er worked with puzzles before… There is the dye that needs to beryllium made, the puzzle committee of conscionable the close thickness and density that needs to beryllium finalised, the people prime and lamination that mightiness travel disconnected if not stuck properly, the cutting of the pieces with adjacent pressure, truthful that they are seamless,” she lists disconnected the apical of her head. “Fortunately, helium did a marvellous occupation and moving with him was the close decision, considering that I was a pugnacious prime power pesterer,” she says. She recalls “swallowing bucketfuls of accent and anxiety”, learning that “nerves are portion of the process”, and the warmth of the enactment of her aboriginal followers. To those starting out,  the creator advises, “Find the close radical to assistance you — adjacent if it takes a year.”

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From societal media polls for followers to archer her what they privation to see, to her absorption connected “culturally affluent backdrops” successful puzzles, truthful that they are enjoyable solves, jigsaw puzzles person intelligibly ne'er been conscionable a solitary enactment for Banerjee. No fig successful her creation is “alone” oregon steals absorption — they are all, always, successful speech with each different — adjacent arsenic objects.

“Before I commencement sketching, I walk immoderate clip formulating the communicative down the artwork and collecting images. Most of the time, I person precedents successful mind: a beautifully designed interior from a magazine, oregon carnal drawings successful an aged subject book… I seemed to ever commencement with an absorbing abstraction and past enactment retired however to capable it, who would inhabit the abstraction and how.  It is similar imagining the idiosyncratic interiors of each of my characters.” 

For the archetypal clip successful a while, this writer doesn’t caput a sensory overload. 

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