SALT OF MY MIND

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!