Overview

Human life is an intimate reflection of the great cycles of nature, universal, perennial and all-pervasive. Of most significance to us here on earth are the sun and moon, their locus and path in the sky, linked to the arrival, change and departure of the seasons – all existence on earth depends upon this eternal, unstoppable and regular movement that is a manifestation of reet, cosmic ‘truth’ or ‘order’. Darkness veils light; light infuses darkness; through increasingly refined gradations of luminosity the gross becomes subtle, opacity becomes transparency; transformations revert to original states and re-manifest, and the reiterations continue. As closely and precisely bound as warp and weft, sun and moon invest each other with meaning, each completing the other’s activity as they illumine the visible sphere. And they occasionally unite through dramatic superimposition, as in the radiant shock of full eclipse when day is transformed into night. It is all one process – expansion and contraction, dispersion and compression, emanation and dissolution.

My current works are based on an ongoing stage of my personal journey. I use the metaphor of visible and invisible rafoogari/ traditional darning to invoke sudden, unexpected and violent rupture in our daily experience of the apparently seamless, stable, reliable order of things. My aesthetic is a symbolic affirmation of the place, significance and act of existential ‘repair’ in the corroded fabric of any life, as well as in the life of any corroded fabric. The edges of gashes and fissures in vulnerable cloth have to be continuously aligned, firmly yet delicately gripped, and sealed stitch by careful stitch to prevent further ripping and other damage, and to render the weave and its patterns intact and whole. 

My mixed-media works arise from a thorough symbiosis – the natural ‘cloth’ fibres disappear into the paper, the natural ‘paper’ fibres vanish into the cloth; they completely inhabit, host, embed, render, transform and ultimately subsume each other. Through such fusion a new organic morphology is distilled; the particular relationships that constitute duality are re-inscribed as a unity. In metaphorical terms, these works may be read as signifying a collapse of the threshold between the existential and the transcendental. As I experience it, any seeming disruption of the rhythm of the personal weave is simply another invaluable, dynamic enunciation of the universal continuum of reet. We are no more and no less than vital, mutable skeins in the cosmic warp and weft, infinite, immaculate, imperishable.