I always tell people that I work with paper, and not on it. I make my own paper with plant and textile fibres and shape these freshly made pulp and sheets into relief works, sculptures and installations. The material– both fragile and malleable, as well as strong and resistant– is an active participant in the process of meaning-making that surrounds my artworks. 

The versatility of paper gives me the space to grapple with the many facets of human experience. As you will see through a compilation of my works below, I am concerned with questions of ephemerality and the after lives of material objects, people, ideas, and the human form. They are the absent presences that exist in the form of traces in our memories, or associations evoked through objects, even after their apparent demise. My work grapples with the frailty of human relationships, and the inadequacy of words in conveying what we wish to say. It is concerned with the cyclical nature of personal and societal desires, that are constantly on the lookout to consume. Finally, I am preoccupied with the question of meaning-making, and the multiple associations that certain visuals can evoke. Here, meaning is not a fixed entity, but something that emerges in conversation between the viewers’ and artists’ shifting subjectivities. 

Thousand desires

As humans, we are in the constant throes of our desires: the desire to eat, have sex, and consume goods and  services. These desires do not vanish after they are fulfilled once, they keep returning like waves in a sea. My work A thousand desires is a visual metaphor for this unresolved position, where each tongue represents a tiny desire. It is as if I have culled all these desires together and displayed them as an assembly; in this state the desires gain an independence of their own, becoming an enticing as well as repelling image.

Cross talk

Cross talk is about how we communicate at an individual and societal level, where the actual meaning of what is being said is lost in prejudiced hearing and the misunderstandings that arise as a result. It is also about how one image can suggest more than one meaning to the viewer depending on their background and mindset. At the heart of the problem is this subjectivity of what words and images can mean.

Silent Echo

In Silent Echo, I bring together diverse objects that act as windows into my world. They are infused with associations or echoes from my  life, and are thus, at once, both silent and eloquent; inhabiting a space between physical truth and imagined reality. Here, I invite viewers to be participants in the mechanics of meaning-making, presenting them with a world which they must work actively to make sense of. 

White Memories

The White Memories set of works looks at the life cycle of an object. It  invokes ways in which these objects become repositories of memory, nostalgia, intangible values and narratives. As time passes objects lose their relevance and become relics. But their tactile memory remains in our mind. Some objects enter our collective memory because of their presence in museums. The ‘White Memories’ works convey a parallel to those museumised memories by evoking tactile memories. The memories of objects traced here are faint but delicate; one has to look at them closely to acknowledge their presence in a liminal space which straddles the past and present. 

The process of creating them is also a similar fusion of many disciplines. I carve the initial drawing on a slab of plaster of paris (POP) like a wood-cut, but I extract the impression from the slab like an etching process. Upon the carved slab I lay a freshly formed handmade sheet of paper made from cotton rag and press it firmly so that the pulp enters all the carved recesses of the POP block. Once the sheet dries it I gently remove it from the slab and burnish it. Metaphorically the process also mimics the way memories of objects are etched in our minds.

Kaya / O Brother

My younger brother’s demise was a shock and left a profound impact on me. In this work I wanted to capture the delicate and ephemeral nature of the body, and present it as a visceral experience. Handmade paper is a tactile and sensitive medium that can be both sturdy and gentle at the same time. The outer membrane-like layers are made from stretched Hanji fibre and inner form is created from Daphne fibre.   

My Father Said

Idea: It has been three years since my father passed away (7 June 2021). He was a typist and also had a letterpress printing shop for a while. I had a  complicated relationship with him. While we cared about each other, and agreed on many things, we also strongly differed in our religious beliefs, political opinions and world views. He was a ritualistic, and religious person and a hardcore right-winger, a political ideology which I didn’t subscribe to. Making this book has become a process for me to reflect on our difficult relationship and attempt to understand how this negotiation has shaped me. For several years until his death, we did not speak about politics because it would lead to serious arguments; there was an unwritten agreement between us. All my life I tried to separate our political views from our filial bond, so that I could love and care for him in spite of our differences, and I’m sure he did the same. The book has taken the shape of a series of dialogues between him and me. Some of which he said directly to me at various points and some which were unsaid, or suggested. Ideas of ‘parental script’ and my ways of contesting them were also at the back of my mind while making this work.

The book itself is a coming together of two viewpoints, mine and my father’s.. My father had left a diary in which he had recorded his views about me in Kannada (my mother tongue). I found them in his cupboard after his demise and I have used those lines as in-between text. He has written about my high school days, my intense desire to join art school and how he struggled to support me in those days, and how proud he was of my achievements. This manifests in two parallel narratives that unfold through these pages, they converge and diverge at various points. 

Form: I have created the work in book form to suggest recording and bookkeeping. The size of the book is that of a ledger. It is physical and palpable. It is kept on an x-shaped stand which is used to keep holy books in Indian tradition. For me it also suggests the power-dynamics in the relationship we shared. Especially in the Indian context, a father holds lot of power in the family, his approval or disapproval matters a lot to the child. I saw him as an authority but also had to defy him to assert myself and hold my ground. The recurring phrase, ‘My father said’ was to highlight repeatedly being instructed. 

My father was  a typist, he had a Remington typing machine. So I have used a typeface which is reminiscent of that. The text itself was created in Photoshop and transferred using toner transfer method. The papers were made in my studio and transfer of text was done at Atelier Prati, a print studio in Bangalore. The binding has been done in traditional Korean binding method.         

Material and making: The papers used in this book were made by me in the Hollander beater in my studio from ‘Panche’ (a long piece of white cloth wrapped around the lower part of the body) used by my father. According to Brahmin rituals a dead person is also wrapped around in white cloth. The threads seen in this book are called ‘Janivara’. It is a sacred thread worn by theBrahmin male as a mark of his religious beliefs. It is a constant reminder of their allegiance to the faith. The  thread pieces are sandwiched between two sheets of paper,  the lower sheet being thick and the upper layer which in ultra thin. The cover page with the image of scissors suggests cutting while the last page suggests sewing, bonding, which is constantly happening in the book. 

In the book I have cut the  Janivara thread into pieces (which is sacrilege) and used them as lines. In the pages where ‘My father said’ text appears they are seen as ruled lines, indicating rules set by my father and the religion. Where I agree with him the lines  run parallel, in cases when I agree with him partially they tilt at an angle and when I completely disagree with him  they criss cross diagonally. Only in the page where we express our love for each other, there are no lines. I also see these lines as links which are difficult to erase. The impression from the lines on one side are imprinted on the other to suggest how we affected each other.       

The seed

In this work I have combined the form of Lotus seed and a Stupa.  As a form it signifies many beginnings but in treatment it suggests loss and decay. The form is created by using wire like a structural form and Lokta paper is wrapped around it in many places. The fragility of the paper adds to the resulting evocative image. 

Shroud of Bapu

In 2008, I had planned to take a cast of my body in cloth dipped in resin, such that the features of my body would be clearly visible, but the form itself would be hollow, suggesting an absence. After noting this in my journal I had forgotten all about it until recently. Then in 2019 I read about the Shroud of Turin, which is supposed to have wrapped Jesus of Nazareth while he was buried after the crucifixion. Then a few months later I saw images of Antony Gormley’s sculptures of people sleeping while covering themselves in thin cotton fabric. He had made them by dipping cloth in Plaster of Paris and laying it over friends who were sleeping in different postures. These were inspired by his travels in India, where he saw people sleeping on railway platforms covering themselves in thin cloth. 

On 5 November, 2019 I had an idea to cast Gandhi figurines I have with me in freshly made paper. In hindsight I realize that the idea has been hovering in my mind for a while, and all of these triggers made it come together.  

My Shroud of Bapu works are about the absence of Mahatma Gandhi. This shroud is sacred but hollow. It is a metaphor for the present-day Indian condition when we have let go of his  ideals and essence, and only retained the cover. Interestingly, when seen from the rear side, some of them also look like the site of Bamiyan Buddha, where the image of Buddha has been destroyed.  This of course was a later observation. 

The technique I have used here is very simple. I made fresh sheets of paper and laid them over the Gandhi figurines I have in my collection and pressed them. After the paper dried, I gently eased out the formed paper. The resulting cast retained the impression of the form on which it was laid. These are papers from recycled cotton fabric. So, it is literally and metaphorically a shroud of Bapu. Gandhi’s features are so iconic that even a faint impression has a recall value in the viewer’s mind. I  tried a few iterations and plan to do a few more in different fibers including paper made from recycled Khadi cloth.