The Last Glimpse: A Tribute To A Vanishing Wild Art Exhibition By Kalyani Pramod At Alliance Française | A Textile & Mixed Media Art Exhibition Explores Biodiversity Crisis & Tells The Stories Of 73 Endangered Animal Species & The Challenges Threatening Their Survival, From Coral Reefs To Caged Birds, Weaving Together Beauty, Waste And Biodiversity Loss, Made From Scrap Materials
– exhibition weaves beauty, waste and loss of species on the brink
| CasualWalker’s Rating for The Last Glimpse Art Exhibition : | |
9.9 – Beauty, Hope, Conservation |
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Common Threads Studio and Alliance Française of Madras came together to present The Last Glimpse, a compelling solo exhibition by textile and mixed media artist Kalyani Pramod. Held at the Alliance Française of Madras in Chennai.
Built around seventy three individual artworks, the exhibition explores the alarming decline of biodiversity and the fragile, often fraught relationship between humanity and the natural world, using textile art, upcycled materials and storytelling to turn a pressing ecological crisis into something intimate, accessible and deeply personal for every visitor who walks through its doors.
The Last Glimpse – Exhibition And Why It Matters
The Last Glimpse is a textile and mixed media exhibition built entirely around the biodiversity crisis, that slow, largely invisible unraveling of the natural world that most of us only notice once a species is already gone.
Through seventy three individual artworks, Kalyani looks at endangered birds, animals, reptiles and insects, and asks a simple but uncomfortable question, what happens to all of us when they disappear. The exhibition leans on real data rather than sentiment alone. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and its Red List of Threatened Species, more than forty eight thousand species across the world are currently under threat of extinction, and in India alone, over thirteen hundred species fall into this same worrying category.
Species today are vanishing at a rate that is a thousand to ten thousand times faster than what nature intended, almost entirely because of human activity. That single fact sits quietly at the heart of every piece in this show.
Kalyani Pramod – The Artist
Kalyani Pramod is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, educator and creative director of Common Threads, a fiber arts studio based in Chennai. She graduated in textile design from the National Institute of Design in 1983, and over the decades her practice has grown to include sculpture, mixed media painting, pottery, and two and three dimensional textile art. Alongside running Common Threads Studio, she serves as a guest faculty member at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, and is also the co founder of Shuttles and Needles, a studio dedicated to weaving, spinning and felting.
Some of the central themes she keeps returning to include documenting the lifestyles and craft practices of artisan communities, empowering people with limited vocational experience through creative training and self expression that encourages self reliance, and working closely with discarded waste materials to give them new life and new meaning.
Her contributions have been recognised both nationally and internationally. She received the Nari Shakti Award from the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India, for her work towards the empowerment of women, and her pieces have been exhibited at globally respected venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Al Sadu House in Kuwait.
She has also spent years working closely with handloom weavers and artisan communities across Tamil Nadu. What makes Kalyani’s practice so distinct is her refusal to separate craft from conscience. She does not see textile art as decoration alone. For her, every piece of fabric, every scrap of wire, every discarded object carries a story, and her role as an artist is to listen to that story and give it shape.
Idea Behind The Last Glimpse
The seeds of The Last Glimpse were sown during Kalyani’s earlier exhibition, Bhumi, which focused on climate change and took her deep into research on coral reefs and marine ecosystems. While studying how a single dying coral reef could trigger a chain reaction, wiping out fish populations and eventually entire marine systems, she found herself unable to stop there.
Around the same time, her research into forest fires and deforestation showed her how birds, animals and insects were quietly slipping away from our landscapes. Everything, she realised, traced back to human interference. That realisation became the emotional and intellectual foundation of The Last Glimpse.
While researching for the show, Kalyani made a deliberate choice to depend on a credible, established conservation authority rather than scattered articles and secondhand information. She built her work around the IUCN Red List, treating it almost like a companion through the process. Each time she read about another bird or mammal edging closer to extinction, she says it left a mark on her, and that emotional weight eventually found its way into fabric, wire, plastic and thread.
Materials, Meaning And Method
Nothing in The Last Glimpse is bought new for the sake of the show. Every material has a past life. Construction site tin sheets and iron rods, copper wire crocheted into the shape of a red panda curled up in a burning forest, electrical wire twisted to form the silhouette of a Great Indian Bustard caught mid flight near power lines, fishing net repurposed for a hawksbill turtle, old newspapers spun and crocheted into new textures, beads salvaged from export rejected cushion covers, and discarded flex hoardings used as canvas.
Kalyani often mentions that her biggest source of material is the local kabadiwala, the neighbourhood scrap collector, and she actively encourages her students to look at waste differently, as raw material waiting for a second story rather than as garbage.
Techniques across the show include crochet, weaving, embroidery, punch needle work and other mixed media practices, each chosen carefully to suit the species and the story being told. One particularly striking piece uses appliqué and tie dye to depict the yellow breasted bunting, a small bird that is trapped in cages and eaten in parts of the world, its numbers falling sharply due to hunting pressure. Kalyani deliberately avoided showing the cruelty directly. Instead, the cage is recreated from a found grill sourced from a scrap dealer, and the bird itself is rendered with a softness that makes it harder, not easier, to look away from.
Every one of the seventy three works is paired with an information panel that lists the species, the specific threats it faces, an explanation of the materials used and what they symbolise, and a short poem written in the voice of that very species. These four to eight line poems, almost like quiet pleas from the animal itself, are especially aimed at younger visitors and first time gallery goers, helping them connect emotionally with the science rather than simply reading statistics on a wall.
Hope Alongside The Warning
While the exhibition does not shy away from difficult truths, Kalyani is careful to keep despair from taking over. She points to real conservation success stories, species like the ibis and the blackbuck that have shown genuine recovery thanks to sustained, patient intervention. Her message through The Last Glimpse is less about guilt and more about agency, the idea that if we choose to act now, some of what we are on the verge of losing can still be saved.
The exhibition also extended well beyond the gallery walls through a month long public programme, including screenings of the documentary Turtle Walker, conversations with wildlife photographers and cinematographers, and hands on workshops that taught visitors to create art from reclaimed CDs, fabric scraps and other recycled materials, alongside sessions on pangolin conservation and handmade bird feeders. Every artwork on display was also available for sale at modest prices, with the accompanying panel and poem included, so that the story travels home with the buyer rather than ending at the gallery door.
What stayed with me was not the scale of the show but its patience, the way a single crocheted red panda or a wire bustard could hold so much grief and so much craft at once. Reading the little poems beside each piece, in the imagined voice of the animal, was oddly moving in a way statistics rarely manage to be. It felt less like visiting an art exhibition and more like sitting quietly with seventy three small, urgent stories, and walking out of Alliance Française with a slightly heavier, more thoughtful heart than when I walked in.
The Last Glimpse offers something rare, a show that is genuinely informative, deeply personal and quietly beautiful all at once. It sits comfortably alongside the city’s growing interest in eco conscious art, biodiversity awareness and handmade craft traditions, while also gently nudging every visitor to think a little harder about consumption, waste and our shared responsibility toward the natural world.
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