SALT OF MY MIND

                                One of those things that make you feel proud and contented! After an absolutely intense year and an even more vehement couple of weeks finalizing and installing the main work for the degree show, my mind felt empty and spent for a long time after that. It was a big adventure; not just working with multidimensionality in a single work and trying to combine two mediums (performance and Visual art), but doing it in such a way that it did not seem forced and could justify the concept I was wanting to express. MID LIGHT, A mixed media installation of found objects, Sculptures, Drawings, and Videos, was inspired by the contrast of eternity in the creation (Orlando novel) and the mortality of the creator (Virginia Woolf's suicide). Not intended to be just an illustration of the novel or Virginia Woolf's personality/character, I dissolved it enough to allow my own interpretation to be visible as well, and the whole installation became more of a

The Indian Classical art field is a great pioneer of selflessness, the dissolving of the ‘self’ and the ‘ego’ to be able to create and share art in a pure manner, whether music or dance. But as an artist progresses on the path of time, there does come a point where, after having sufficiently been obedient and trying to dissolve the ‘I’, the ‘I’ is the only thing that looms large as a question mark. It is a strange paradox; and without that ‘I’, there seems to be no path further which could probably lead to an ‘I’ lessness. Scott McCloud is one of the new Gods I have discovered in the haven of art, through his brilliant book ‘Understanding Comics – the invisible art’.   There I discovered what had been missing in my Bharathanatyam journey. McCloud, though talking essentially of comics, does touch on various things which are common to all art forms. One of them was the 6 step path – a path which every artist, either consciously or unconsciously, and not necessarily in the same

It was not until the summer of 2012 during a residency in New York that I, as an Art student, had the wonderful fortune of drawing from life. We had a live model who posed nude for us, twice a week.  After that first life drawing experience of having gone through hopeless frustration at not being able to gauge the life in front of me to fairly good progressions in later drawings, it sunk in to me that I had been through 5 years of undergrad without a single nude life drawing class. In fact, we only ever had older men and women model for us, decked in turbans and layers of  sari . It would have been good if it had been a part of the study, and not the concentrated whole. What is this stigma against nude modeling for art in India? Or is it only in my imagination? But if it is, then why did we not have a SINGLE such study in 5 whole years? When I took a few more classes in London, I  couldn't  help observing, during the breaks, how the students were  careful not to take photogra

UNDISSOLVED THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE                                                                                              “…Here, no here makes sense… presence and absence battle at the core of its every word, with absence winning out.’ (E.J. la Demeure et le livre’, Mercure de France – Gabriel Bounoure – quoted in ‘The Book of Margins’- Edmund Jabes, Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop .)                                                                            CONTENTS ABSTRACT                                                                                                                      PROLOGUE                                                                                                  ACT I – The Presence of Absence                           ACT II – On The Threshold                                                     Paintings and Drawings                                                            Abstraction of Ballet chara