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I draw these small tiny forms of seeds clustered, spread across, impregnated with energy, juggling, and ready to break free. I have been concentrating in my art practice exploring dimensions of drawing and using a variety of media from works on paper, paper-pulp, canvas, cloth, and extending drawing practice to photography, videos, drawing in space and collaborating with performance art.

My works can be said to be in a space where painting and drawing merge; they could be paintings but their strong linear nature could make them appear as drawings. They are minimal, meditative in nature, where line itself is organic and visceral; drawing always is in a process, of becoming, of taking new shape, new possibilities, new beginnings???.

I believe art happens when mind-spirit-body is in unison, working at multiple levels, from inside to outside, subliminal to conscious creating an experience that is inside as well as outside, an emotion that is strong and there. For me it is one line or many lines??? intersecting, parallel or circular, the line creates its own experience, its own emotion.

Drawing lines in random circles or like a mesh of criss-cross, from delicate to strong marks on tactile surface of paper symbolize both physical and mental space. On the surface of time, transient and continuously in motion, every moment there is birth, growth and death, memories, thoughts, recalling and new ideas??? Like patterns stiff, solid and deep etched and a constant effort to let them loose and make them disappear???

About Inscriptions on the surface of the transitory

This collection brings together the works of three artists dealing with the intimate, the personal, and the immediate- in a language that is subtle, noiseless and nuanced. It seemed an interesting proposition to put them together, to find common threads in the differences and differences in the commonalities. They work primarily with line and texture, except for Rashmi, but her language is more graphic than painterly. It is not 'drawings' in the conventional sense of the term that brought these artists together in this colelction; on the other hand, their works fit almost perfectly to what Meredith Malone once wrote about drawings of some minimalist, post-minimalist, and conceptual artist:

" (the works) readily embraced drawing's salient attributes-its mobility and elasticity, its economy and antimonumental character, its exploratory nature, and its facility for acting as a mediator, translating abstract concepts into form--to produce works that are notational, diagrammatic, and reductive. Often small in scale, delicate, playful, and highly nuanced, these drawings suggest a level of intimacy and direct encounter with the artists' thoughts and intentions that is less readily apparent in other mediums. Drawing is approached here as a powerful if under recognized lens through which to explore the productive tensions between rational calculation and subjective expression, concept and material form, and precision and disorder that animate much of the work on view in this collection." (Meredith Malone, The Porous Practice of Drawing: System, Serially, and the Handmade Mark in Minimal and Conceptual art).

Rashmi’ s interest lies in interpreting her observations of the immediate and 'seemingly' ordinary. She picks up common place objects from domestic life and converts them in to protagonists, by removing all the peripheral props, thus burdening her objects with the job of narrating stories of life without any supporting cast & crew. The domestic interior world of Rashmi's work allows nature to come in only in the form of food (consumerist callousness of human race ?). Nehal and Sarita build up their images through mark making. Nehal's mark making seems to be a process of allowing the lines to flow freely, and then gently - without much nudging and coaxing - guiding them in to a coherent entity. Her work looks like a reductive, almost abstract representation of vast landscapes and her fluid non-representative lines sometimes transform into small but recognizable motifs- such as leaves, flowers, etc. Leaves and seeds seem to be regular imageries in Sarita's work, suggesting decay (fallen leaves) and new beginnings (seeds) - the natural cycle. Sarita's mark making process seems to be the opposite of Nehal's - starting with preconceived marks and then allowing them to find their own way towards conclusion and totality. The works of both Nehal and Sarita are results of dialogues between the spontaneous and the guided, and how they negotiate with each other' under the observing eye of the artist.

In this collection, Nehal presents a selection from her recent body of works, done in lines – mostly fluid, but also lines like stitches, lines like doodling. In some works she uses color minimally, with a sense of absolute necessity. Few of her works are in color- color muted and atmospheric, although they are different from the works done in lines, they evoke a similar spatial character – landscapes without horizon, sometimes panoramic, sometimes topographic, inviting the viewer to walk in and explore the possibility of journeys without obstacles, and without pre- decided paths either. Rashmi presents a series of objects (and grains and ants) in close ups, mostly put together in repetitive sequences. Her repetition is neither playful nor mechanical but almost like chants – as if saying the same word again and again to make a point without elaborating much. In most of her works there is a conscious attempt to not fall for the lure of variations, and the works come alive precisely because of this apparent lack of variations.

Sarita’s work is microscopic - enlarging the minute to an extent that its identity blurs into abstract forms at a casual glance. A patient viewer will find a lot more to discover in this maze of criss-cross lines and grey & silver marks. One series, for example, has holes (made by burning) which are then inserted with silver foil from behind - very subtly, to the point of going unnoticed. Her work demands patience and attention, revealing itself through a process of absorbing rather than just 'seeing'.

The works of these three artists stand together with their..,
choice to weave micro-narratives rather than grand narratives,
pursuit of the minute rather than the monumental,
creating ripples rather than waves,
making notations rather than statements,
their modest desire to inscribe, not on the altar of time but on the surface of the transitory.

Nikhleswar Baruah