Mee Jey’s studio is covered in fabric. There are colorful stacks in her studio, cloth balls overflowing out of a box in the closet, and elaborate designs of woven fabric hanging from the ceiling. “I use whatever materials are cheaply or freely available,” she explains.
The artist's work is on display now through December 23 in three windows on Maryland Plaza as part of “A Walking Xmas Carol,” a 21-stop musical and window display in the Central West End. But Jey didn’t set out to be an artist. It wasn’t something people set out to do in her hometown in Bihar, one of the poorest states in India. But Jey always painted, and in the middle of an ethnographic graduate research project she was conducting on Indian folk painters, her guide urged her to pursue art, telling her, “You talk about art as an artist, not as a researcher.”
When she tried to break into the art scene in India, she was met with resistance. “I was an outsider in the art world," she says. "Nobody accepted me as an artist." Art in India “was very elitist and exclusive, and we [she and her husband, Jey Sushil] both come from humble backgrounds. Galleries treated us like, 'Who are you? You’re not a buyer. You’re not an artist. Get out of here.'”
So she and Sushil, who at the time was a BBC correspondent, created a relational art project, mainly so they could travel and Jey could create art. It began as a barter. “We’ll paint a little corner of your house in return for your hospitality,” she says. They started with a seven-stop trip through South India in 2014 on motorbike and in 2015, they expanded it to a 45-day trip to accommodate all the invitations. From Kashmir to Goa, they painted over 70 murals alongside families, kids, and villagers.
The project caught the eye of M. J. Warsi, a professor at Washington University, and though attending a university in the U.S. was not originally in her plans, Jey began the MFA program in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts in 2017. Coming to St. Louis gave Jey the time and space she needed to create art. She also found a supportive community in St. Louis and really began to expand her practice. “Sam Fox gave me the opportunity to create whatever I wanted, and I was just so ambitious,” she says.
Jey uses art to explore everyday life. In one project, she and Sushil created daily videos for an entire year of the two of them discussing art. In her current project, Jey documents Sushil’s daily activities and thoughts in portraits that she creates from materials that include paint, ink and paper, pipe cleaners, faux leather, holographic film, and more.
Her favorite medium, though, is whatever is inexpensive and readily available. Jey points to a towering stack of fabric—“All of this was donated,” she says. When Jey saw the amount of clothing that people discard in St. Louis, she put out a call for donated fabric. She never could have imagined the response. “I had a 10-by-15 studio, and it was so full that I had no space to walk,” she says, laughing.
Recycling the fabric felt natural for Jey. “I come from a childhood where I wore my brother’s clothes, and we would buy one new dress each year,” she says. Working with fabric also connected her to India in another way. “India is one of the largest producers of cotton. Indian and Bangladeshi laborers die working for big manufacturers, and nobody pays them any real compensation,” she says. “They live in the most dire situations, manufacturing for the wealthiest people in the world.”
Jey is mindful of the “memory and identity” of each fabric she works with from its origins on a cotton farm in India to the consumer who purchased it and ultimately donated it to her. “I incarnate it into a different form and it becomes a different thing.”
