WHEN IMAGES SPEAK BACK
18 Dec, 2017 - 28 Feb, 2018
Nungambakkam
WHEN IMAGES SPEAK BACK
By Sharmi Chowdhury
My artistic practice is an attempt to understand the idea of migration, dislocation, existence of oneself. Visual art, for me is primarily about communication, just like language, but unlike language, where the rules and codes of meanings are culture and tradition specific, visual communication is always universal. What matters to me is the environment where my work expresses itself, for very often it is the same environment that gives it its meaning and beauty. The nature of my work is fluid and communicative, or so I believe. The scroll as a format attracts me and I have done many works with tempera and water colours where the scroll format is used for storytelling through the unfolding of events and people. However, my work is more allegorical than narrative in spirit and allegory as a hermeneutic form allows me to fluidly incorporate various traditional visual resources in order to bring more heterogeneity in my imageries. An encounter with any new culture, new tradition, therefore helps me reorient my own engagement with my language, its tools and come up with newer solutions on each occasion. I confront childhood incidents, emotions, fears; desires pulled out from memory by transferring them as an outcome in my own artistic practice. The cycle, the tents, the bridge, the birds, the banyan tree all of these elements keep on reappearing in my compositions, as a remembrance of my shift from my hometown to a smart city of Gujarat. These elements also give hints on ancestral history of the migration that my family has gone through. Thus my works reside in between autobiography and fictional reportage. As a result in my works I see facts meeting fiction, animals, and birds, landscapes the girl in white converse among themselves, the inner self and the outer world exchange their places and create a visual world of its own. During my days in Shantinikatan I’ve been inspired by Benodebehari Mukherjee’s and Nandalal Bose’ works, who, in turn were influenced by far eastern Art and its various traditions, most notably that of the scroll painting and also calligraphy. After coming to Baroda artists like Bhupen Khakhar and Nilima Sheikh has been inspiration for me, because of their understanding of the traditional medium and the contemporary world. The huge spectrum of influences and references I have in my visual language, I try to blend them and bring them together through the course of life and the restlessness typical of our time through which I lIve.