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As a visual artist, I have always been intrigued by the concepts of space and the way it produces some sort of ethereal experience when entered. The desire to solidify this intangible experience of ‘being there’ or even just the ‘essence of a place’ in an object has led to most of my previous work. All this while little did I realise that when I referred to these objects I made as ‘places’, it wasn’t about one place or any place, but rather more about the time and the state or condition that they were in.

 

Back in my country, there have been huge political changes in the past two years. The State I live in, split into two and therefore the need for a new capital city has drastically changed the fate of its land. In the span of a year, stretches of agricultural land have transformed into residential, urban plots. This ‘shift’ that was taking place around me was both unsettling and intriguing. I suddenly realised how ‘land’ itself was in a state of constant flux — the encroachment, displacement, dislocation and the bereavement of its identity . In the long term, even the architecture that was coming into these spaces was not going to be a permanent fixture. With the ephemeral urbanity and architecture’s utopian fallacy, it felt like ‘land’ itself was in a ‘continual transit’. My current body of work focuses extensively on amplifying this unsettling yet very existent relationship between land and architecture. 

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Though my forte lies with drawing and painting media, of late I have been drawn to sculptural forms and site-specific works involving materials such as concrete, ceramic, metal and wood. The ontology of sculpture, the role of aesthetics in perceiving an art object, our cognitive memory and the associations we make when we see an object are few of the concepts I always seem to ponder upon during my theoretical research.