The inter connectedness of systems: of language, ecology, politics and art.
The directness of drawing: as a way of looking, perceiving, seeing and thinking.
The language of the natural world.
I am interested in language, and multiple points of imparting and receiving knowledge.
I am interested in language: textual and concrete.
These are the motivating factors in my work. I am interested in multiple points of imparting and receiving knowledge. And I am particularly interested in that place where written language fails and other forms persist: maybe in the caves of Lascaux or Bhimbhetka, or that moment of encounter with a piece of pottery, millions of years old.
I consider most of my work drawing. To draw suggests the act of drawing an image as well as the act of pulling something out, drawing water from a well, drawing on memories, drawing from those humours within myself. Such a direct act. It is not only that I love to draw, ink on a page, gouache to paper, but I also love to draw connections between and amongst things: visual, linguistic, formal, conceptual connections.
This drawing of invisible lines. Ma(r)kers for meaning.
Repetition and doubling are recurring tropes in my manner of working. As are ideas of metonymy and multiplicity. My work is influenced by literature, biology, philosophy and anthropology. The materials I use are paper, water colors, photographs, sound, spoken word, and video. I write original texts which become recorded audio pieces that are heard alongside drawings or 3-dimensional work. The sound, drawings and objects come together to produce an effect of a larger whole, or an immersive environment for the viewer to enter. The materials are in dialogue together, connected by their physical materiality, but also the very structure of the language that informs the work.
In my installations I am interested in creating a phenomenological experience - haptic as well as conceptual. For a site-specific work called Mother of Intentions - set in a cavernous 27 x 27 x 27 foot cube I dropped three equidistant consecutive walls of white gauze fabric from the ceiling. I projected videos from either end of the space onto these fabric walls. Viewers moved through the rows of fabric, where based on their position in the space, the middle fabric held a third and continuously reconstituting image.
I work in drawing, collage, sculpture, video and found or self-scripted texts. These elements are presented in immersive environments which the viewer enters into, and sometimes physically interacts with. My projects respond specifically to ideas such as - how does the mind holds a concept like infinity, how the capacity for empathy might be learned from observing termites, exploring the spirit and politics of collective action, and how the ‘other’ gets defined in relationship to the ‘center’.
Born and raised in Kolkata, India and having studied further in the United States has informed a sensitivity to location, dislocation, temporality, and place. In resistance to binaries of ‘here’ and ‘there’ my work proposes a third position T(here) - physically as well as aesthetically.