SALT OF MY MIND

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