Nature of Existence

Ruma Choudhury

Born in a small village in Birbhum, I was surrounded by Nature but, for me, it was not just a place filled with Nature all around, rather, it was a space which spoke about my existence as a human being. My early works predominantly featured different aspects and images of Nature and its multiple objects. When I shifted my base from Birbhum to the metropolitan city of Kolkata, the shifting of images also came with the shifting of the place. The effect of a busy city life took its toll on me and my creativity. I started facing a deep existential crisis, which affected my thoughts and my own experiences. I witnessed how the greenery of nature is lost in the concrete jungle jam-packed with human figures. Suddenly my inspiration faced a huge blockage, I became creatively numb for a long time.

In the city, the fast and busy people rarely have the time to breathe freely and realise their surroundings and their affections. This fact was a crude realisation for me, as I saw people rarely give importance or care for the nature-objects. Their survival mode compels them to overlook the actual source of their sustenance. With utter sadness and mourning, I realised that along with me, Nature is also facing a crisis which too is an existential one. As an artist, my journey that took a new turn. With the introduction to city life, it took a lot of thought, realisation and self-assessment for me to choose and find the right path to re-ignite my creative self. Firstly, I tried to re-create an ambience in my house which was naturally available in Birbhum. I started gardening and planting extensively within the limited space where I stayed. Through this practice, I gained back the feeling and association I had with Nature and it gave me huge mental satisfaction and happiness. A faith was built-up inside me that, through this activity of caring and giving importance to nature, I was building a positive space which is missing in the city. Nature would also be able to cope up with the strong negativity of existential crisis.

I had learnt and practiced paper-making rigorously and even made paper from different plants and fibres since my college days. After moving to the city life, I once again started paper-making and I also started composing and drawing on those papers. I started experimenting by synthesizing my drawings and the art of paper-making,  while treating the surface as a part of my drawing. The existential crisis in me and for the Nature in this city turned out to be an impetus for me to re-invent paper-making; paper itself became a part of my subject.

As I made the paper out of natural fibres like banana, tussar, and sugarcane, and incorporated them as elements, I felt that Nature was uncaged by me. I continued with my art making process and soon realised that the city life had affected my subjects as well. While I was drawing what I was seeing around, human figures also entered my compositions, I consciously let that happen, as I thought it to be a justified reflection of my current mental state. I observed and perceived the physical resemblance between parts of the human body and natural objects and brought them into my composition.

I started infusing the element of pain in my composition that I could see in Nature because of the lack of love and care that human beings have for it. I wish to speak for Nature; Nature always absorbs pain and agony, but seldom retaliates. Expressing its anxiety through my works, by depicting the pathos from my perspective as a human being, I create images of Nature crying out its agony like we human beings do. My works are a metaphor for Nature and depict an irony of the human perspective.

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