Saturday, August 25, 2012

Aditi Singh's artistic vision and imagination

A recurring theme in Aditi Singh’s work is the anatomy of flowers as part of her cognitive landscapes. According to the artist, a form chooses you a certain moment and it then won’t leave you in peace.

The artist has been drawing flowers for more than a decade and they still continue to intrigue her. They are not commonplace and can only probably survive in extreme climates. These flowers are not for decorative purpose. And as she believes, perhaps that’s what initially attracted her to them, the ephemeral yet tenacious aspect of their enduring existence. However, a subtle shift in scale marked her recent body of her work presented at Mumbai-based Chemould Prescott Road. Incidentally, the series, entitled ‘Let There be a Heaven of Blackred Roses (2010)’, only brought to the fore her concerns as an artist.

Space is dense, form un-attenuated, and mark making is infinite, dark and textural. According to her, the scale does shift from the intimate to the immense. But the largeness of an image is not decided only by the size of the paper. She had stated in an interview, “I do enjoy playing with dualities/ contradictions. I want viewers to move up close, just to step back, and to have an encounter with the work. In fact, every movement of the body calls for a different mode of viewing.”

As she reveals, the language that one strives to create is merely the beginning of the intriguing discovery process. In drawing them, the artist is only attempting to measure the gap that exists between herself and the form, awaiting the metamorphosis of ‘the One into the Other’. Ultimately, what she is searching for is a space in which the real and imagined, darkness and light, permanent and ephemeral will no more be perceived as contradictions.

She finds it tough to pin down those moments when one actually begins to ‘create’; it’s rather a constant process involving evolution/dissolution. She doesn’t stop making an image once she leaves the studio. In fact, the mind is constantly thinking and imagining, taking things apart, and rearranging. Aditi Singh states to sum up her creative processes.

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