I have not documented my work on paper in a very organised manner for several years now.
The drawings from 2015 were in preparation for the ceramics show at Art and Aesthetics in 2016.
The watercolours from 2020-2021 were done at home during the pandemic. Some were an attempt to pause, others to flow with the rhythms of that strange time, and yet others a response to the dissonance of lives lost and lives found in that upheaval.
The sketchbook images are from a few travels over 2024-25.
In 2021, I rented a friend’s studio and kiln to work on a commission. What was to be a few months of work and one firing, eventually became a couple of years and a kiln that I bought.
"Where The Spirit Meets The Bone", is a series that I began working on during this time. The title is a reference to a poem by Miller Williams, set to music by his daughter Lucinda Williams.
Just that phrase is so charged! The space it describes, that internal weather system, where several fronts meet - the spiritual, the emotional, the physical; the internal and the external. What storms rage in that space ? What transpires after the storm passes ? Who prevails ? what endures ? I will probably be working on these ideas for several years to come.
The "Breath and Shadow", "Devi" and "Held", were series that were the result of “As Above, So Below”, a wonderful online residency with Apurva Kulkarni.
In retrospect, that was one of those significant liminal times. Those moments of passage between the old and the new. It was my first experience of firing a gas kiln, of needing to use glazes, of working in a space, not my own, after twenty some years. The gift of discomfort, was mine to alchemise.
Looking inwards, unravelling. Sloughing, shedding, peeling, revealing kernel. Bone, breath, shadow, light. In this dance with all my improbable selves Meeting stillness.
In 2022, I found myself returning to other ideas that I had worked on, as far back as 2010. ‘Walls Fall’, is one such series. I’m fascinated with the walls we build - the real and the metaphorical.
As Robert Frost said in his poem, Mending Wall, ‘before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out’. We seem to be building more walls than ever, as communities, cultures, nations, and my hope lies in the thought that all these walls eventually fail and fall.
"Walls Fall" is paradoxically, a disintegration that embodies hope. The hope that no human spirit or ideas can remain imprisoned or excluded forever. The walls that attempt to do so, will fall eventually, inevitably.
Seeking centre is a series that I began working on in 2015. As I often do, I have worked on the concept over several years. I pick up on those ideas again in this new work, attempting to express the joy of flowing with the inner voice, often spontaneous, vulnerable and raw.
Living in the world, engaged with all its complexity, while making space for that still centre is to me, the embodied experience of ‘squaring a circle’! This work was made for the show, Squaring the Circle, at Arthshila, Shantiniketan.
Hidden Patterns is a series exploring the idea that we each behave and function in patterns and ways often hidden from our own awareness, only to emerge in rare moments of clarity for our selves, although, perhaps, quite apparent to everyone around us.
In the Indian mythological story of Vishnu’s avatar as Narasimha - half man and half lion, the asura Hiranyakashipu has been granted a boon by Shiva that he would not be destroyed by man or beast, neither during the day nor night, neither indoors nor out. No weapons would harm him. Narasimha dismembers him - with his claws, on a threshold, at dusk.
The threshold, thus recognized as that transient transformative moment when the unexpected transpires.
My project for Breaking Ground, the first edition of the Indian Ceramics Triennial, was a group of three life-size doorways with thresholds.
The intent of the project was to encourage pause; to encourage reflection upon those intermediate spaces that we walk through, oblivious.
The threshold is, to me, that space where all life is. Connecting all that is neither inside nor out, yesterday nor tomorrow, here nor there.
Common Ground was one of the last works I made in my studio of 20 years, which was dismantled just before the pandemic.
Looking for common ground amidst a world polarised by divergent world views, it is a celebration of the diversity that is self assured and willing to embrace difference.
In 2016, I had a solo at the wonderful gallery, Art and Aesthetics, in New Delhi.
Thresholds. Doorways. Fleeting clouds. Ceaselessly flowing rivers. Moulted feathers. Desiccated butterfly wings. Gossamer webs burgeoning even as they fray.
Time-Evanescent. Life-Cyclical. The expression ephemeral. The essence eternal.
A threshold, by definition is that place in time or space that is on the cusp of change. I have long been fascinated by this concept of a place that is neither inside nor out, yesterday nor tomorrow, here nor there. Framed by a doorway, the threshold represents a pause - a moment of stillness, holding within it the certainty of passage. And they have led me, the thresholds and the doorways ever more insistently inwards. Seeking essence. Toward a stillness beyond the momentary.
The passing clouds and ceaseless rivers. Metaphors for the world of the senses. Never the same from one moment to the next. Embracing impermanence.
Sloughing off the husk. Feathers moulting. Awaiting renewal. The singular beauty of desiccated butterfly wings. An archetype of transience and fragility.
And the web. Stretching, connecting, fraying, reconnecting - inter connecting - all life. All that is neither inside nor out, yesterday nor tomorrow, here nor there.
This body of work has found inspiration in Sufi poetry, Buddhist thought, Japanese haiku, nirguni bhajans, and my own journey.
In 2013, I joined a group of 16 Indian ceramic artists for a residency in Fuping - China. I had already been working on the idea of the Threshold for sometime, but there was much more to explore, so many layers to the concept that I wanted to work through.
In the factory at Fuping - which housed the residency studios, the cloud pattern appeared on every other object. It appeared on the Mosque in Xi’an, on the Pagoda and the Taoist temple. It was light, it travelled up to the skies. It appeared on my forms. Thresholds still. Journeys still. And then, of a sudden, stepping through the clouds, into the light ? Into the darkness ? To be lost, to be found, to step into or step out of..
"Time Tapestry" was a series about journeys, and the fact that they are rarely if ever, linear. Time, and the layers of memories it builds up, with some moments emerging luminous in a rich weave of experience.
"No man steps in the same river twice" said Heraclitus. The river, constantly moving, is never the same from one moment to the next. Likewise the man.
Time is a constantly flowing river. And our minds, a maze. I go time traveling oftentimes, through the maze in my head. Into the past and into the future.
Stopping sometimes to savour the hidden spaces, of memories or dreams. In this maze, time takes on enigmatic attributes. A single moment stands still, stretches on forever. An immensity flies by in the blink of an eye. And yet, I am only too aware of the Kalachakra; the wheel of time. Relentlessly moving on. Today might be similar to yesterday, but never the same. And although this moment- Now- might leave an indelible, eternal imprint, it remains ephemeral.
In 2008, I had the immense privilege to apprentice with Sandy Lockwood and Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, incredible women both, and accomplished ceramic artists, in Australia.
The "Ephemeron" series began during my time as an apprentice to Sandy Lockwood. Sandy's beautiful studio is surrounded by the bush. The silence, the dark nights, the constantly decaying and regenerating woods led to an exploration of the idea of the transient nature of all phenomena in Life. Decay and Regeneration are the most common, mundane phenomena in Nature, feeding off each other. All things pass, leaving behind traces of having been there. "Ephemeron" has subsequently appeared in various avatars in my work.
Living, learning, pausing, making, firing, traveling, seeing, learning, connecting, learning… Living. The dots were inspired by the aboriginal art I saw while in Australia in 2008. Much in the way that life unfolds, the dots move, first one way, then another, dancing along, moving forwards, looping back, rarely in a linear march ahead, but always in motion. The dots appeared on several series of work over the next few years.
The pillars for the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chennai were a part of a Ceramic garden project led by Ray Meeker. The pillars were made by a team of artists and their assistants at the Golden Bridge Pottery, and fired there by Ray's assistants and students. I made two separate visits there to paint and glaze the pillars. Special thanks are due to a lot of people for this project. Ray Meeker, Rakhee Kane, Rahul Aurangabadkar, Antra Sinha, Ashwini Bhatt and Veena Chandran.
"Borders and fences" is a series that began around this time. I find the concept of borders and fences intriguing, meant to keep people in or out, boundaries that are both tangible and ephemeral. Even more fascinating are the spaces, the passage ways, that allow glimpses, light, perhaps a way across the borders, behind the fence. "Walls Fall", addresses the strangeness and futility of walls; of the attempts to cast in stone a transient life. In "Peregrination", the dots get more playful. The journey less solemn.
The “Pods” were an intuitive little interlude, as I found myself, obsessively collecting pods during my walks while pregnant. It was almost as though my body was gravitating towards birth and life in other forms! "Secure Insecure" was a series that I started working on, soon after the birth of my child. The house - the home, is such an evocative form. Our sense of belonging, of security, sometimes, the basis of so much insecurity, is so deeply entwined with the spaces we inhabit, physical or psychological.
A "threshold", by definition is that place, in time or space, that is on the cusp of change. I have long been fascinated by this idea of place, that is neither inside nor out, neither yesterday nor tomorrow, here nor there. To me, it represents a pause, a moment of stillness, that holds within it, the certainty of passage, the potential for transformation. So how much does one leave behind, as one crosses the threshold ? What residue does one carry forward ? What does one step away from ? And what does one step into ?
A tiny cube with a minuscule aperture. The fascination of an opening that reveals nothing. "Enigma" is as much about human psychology as it is about my own intense need for privacy.
The bigger kiln I built, on my return from Wales, gave me the room to explore larger sculptural work.
My work here on was predominantly all hand built. A rather slow, almost meditative process, that demands that one spend a long time working on a single piece.
A lot of my work during this time was inspired by the natural world. By the sinuous movement and poise of trees, by the hollows in rocks, where rain water collects every monsoon leaving its mark, by the surfaces of bark and lichen that invite touch, by that strange, intangible sense of time elapsed.
I experimented with the material and firing, adding iron pyrites and feldspar chips to the clay, and using thickly applied slips onto slabs of clay, which I then stretched before working them into forms. I used much less salt, for a drier surface, and a warmer palette.
"Silent Shadows", an installation consisting of 51 cylindrical pieces, all between 18-34 inches high, is a simple image of a mute and helpless forest in a world where human greed has reduced the planet to a catalogue of “resources” to be exploited for commercial gain.
The Parched land, thirsting for Rain, Tree of Life and Carbon Footprint were all just new expressions of old concerns. Prana was a natural progression from there. The jars, vessels and shrine compositions, were an honoring of the life force that animates and surrounds all beings.
Weight was a new direction. A turning inwards.
I made wheel thrown functional ware, for the most part and established a reasonable understanding of my materials, during the initial few years in my studio.
I began hand building a lot more around 2003. The wheel had started to feel a bit tyrannical and with the change in making technique, the forms began to change as did the surfaces.
In 2003, I travelled to Wales, on a Charles Wallace India Trust grant.
I spent a semester at the Ceramics department, University of Wales, Cardiff. I set myself a project-to paint the Welsh seaside landscape and subsequently to translate it into claywork. The intention was, to somehow bring together my desire to paint and my love for clay work, without reducing the painting to a mere decorative element. Clay, like paint lends itself to the expression of fluidity and to a sense of impending movement even in stillness. The most striking aspect of the landscape were the crumbling limestone cliffs along the coast. To bring into any three dimensional work, that sense of movement, of impending change in direction or of imminent collapse that was manifest in those cliffs was going to be a challenge.
The final pieces were, I think, successful. They were able to convey the "landscapeness" without representing it literally. More importantly, for me, I was able to evolve a method that integrated the painting and the clay work rather well.
I then went on, to apprentice with Micki Schloessingk, a studio potter, making decidedly quiet, wholesome functional pottery. This was the first time that I actually got to work with someone experienced in the technique of Salt Glaze, and the experience was invaluable.
At Micki’s a lot of the forms were inspired by the trees I looked out at every day. I squished thick slip into slabs of clay, stretched the slabs and built the pots from these slabs.
On my return to Hyderabad, I rebuilt my kiln, making it much larger. That allowed me to explore more sculptural work, something that I felt ready for.
