SALT OF MY MIND

It was all quite by chance - I came upon a call for artists for a performance residency and on a whim attended an audition workshop. two days later I was packing my bags tp head for one of the most amazing and intense experience as an artist. Staying in rural Somerset amidst lush hills and a hike path just round the corner, 13 dancers/theatre artists came together for 15 days to work on the themes of social exclusion and current youth problems due to unemployment, mainly inspired by the works of Foucault (Read ship of fools - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_fools ). Personally for me, I had the chance to work on a variety of characterizations. We did solos, duets, and group works. Improvisation was the name of the game, and everyday was a new journey. Working with text and objects was completely out of my comfort zone but I did manage to shed my shell during the process. The artists had a chance to design and offer a workshop for the other participants. The relation of visuals

Being predominantly trained in Bharathanatyam, I am very accustomed to using gestures and narratives, making every single nuance of every word of the poem or story absolutely clear and all chalked out. I am very accustomed to every expression 'told through the face and eyes. After beginning training in Ballet 4 years back, I slowly began to gain ground on using the whole body to express a certain thing. How the happiness is burst forth in glorious arabesques and how a pain is mirrored through curved backs and the tip of the head touching the tip of the toe as the ballerina resigns to her fate. Here the whole body becomes the gesture, the whole body becomes the expression, the 'word'.                        Fascinated, and in an attempt to try to assimilate this feel in a  more exaggerated manner in my Bharathanatyam performances, I began studying various characters of various ballets, their moods, emotions, and how they are transferred through the aid of music. Through

Beautiful negatives. Shadows carved. Reality torn. Forms gone (?) Images lost (?) I don't want my Art to reek of  'me'. They say that the most difficult thing to achieve is to free yourself from yourself. For me, from an artists' point of view, it confronts me with the question of how I could free my art from being merely an autobiographical account in different mediums. Nothing wrong with being autobiographic, but I would wish to see my Art cut its umbilical cord and be able to exist on its own space, without carrying the haunted shadows of me. Which is why I began the practice of keeping Visual diaries earlier this year. Though still stemming from my perceptions and experiences, they are visual ( instead of word diaeirs that I am so addicted to) articulation done instantaneously and spontaneously, without carrying the weight of lingering thought and brooding, or becoming carefully sieved and guarded expressions. They help me to stop the business of being c

Not even been a month, and we the MA Fine Art students of Chelsea College of Art and Design were already working towards our first debut exhibition. The more challenging aspect was that we were asked to work with a medium/process that was completely out of our regular practice methods. Talk of comfort zones in Art! So, performance and painting were out of my vision for the time being. I wasn't comfortable with working with video/sound art yet, and so sculpture I sought. I literally ran to the foundry to gather some clay.  Ideas abounded in my head, but because of my inability to handle the material, everything that I made seemed seven seas away from what I actually wanted to make. Like conversations stifled in the throat because of a lack of a language's vocabulary.The forms that emerged seemed to laugh back at me. I struggled for a couple of days trying to make it dance to my tunes. But it wouldn't even begin to walk. And then, just as I do with my beloved canvases, I l

I feel the essence of another presence. A child wants to be born through my head. Wrenched out of my eyeballs. With blood trickling down my lips. Every line, every colour, every form, every little dot has a life of its own. Since I do not seek their permission to bring them out into the world of white paper/canvas or any form of artistic creation but do it only to satisfy my own joy and hunger (Is the intention behind motherhood a bit of selfishness then ?); I a tleast try to give them a life of their own. How much freedom they frisk out of me is yet unknowable and unnecessary; the important thing is they do exist as abstract ideas and as tangible results of those ideas and they have begun to acknowledge my presence as much as I do theirs. Maybe I am putting myself on a high pedestal with this assumed act of creation. But I am so done with flowers and vases and pretty ponds serene beneath magnanimous mountains!