Artist Rohini Devasher’s works explore and bring to the fore boundless possibilities contained within nature; both the practice and the imagery mimic processes, where organisms are born, breed and multiply. A heightened sense of complexity is created through multiple layers and recursion.
She draws upon and morphs diverse elements of the botanical, zoological, human, and mechanical realms; machine, animal, flesh, plant, basically different elements - organic and inorganic – that all combine to fashion a hybrid with obscure antecedents. The outcome is somewhat unclassifiable, a category unto itself. Principles of growth, its rhythms, patterns, and tensions form core of her primary artistic concerns.
Among the important awards and residencies she has won are the INLAKS Fine Art Award and the KHOJ International Residency that she describes an exciting experience offering her a chance to interact with contemporaries from various disciplines and geographies and providing an insight into their ideology and practices.
On her part, the artist has been trying to explore some ideas put forward in Goethe’s Botanical writings in which Goethe’s search for “that which was common to all plants without distinction” led him to evolve a purely mental concept of the archetypal plant. This archetype, when translated into art by some of his followers, resulted in what one writer has described as a ‘botanists’ nightmare’ consisting of all known leaves and flowers combined around a single stem.
For example, in her debut solo, entitled ‘Breed’, she engaged artistically with Goethe’s idea of the archetypal plant. This archetype or ‘Urpflanze’ describes’ - one basic form that manifests in the multitude of single plant individuals- harbors the potential for endless transformation, by which manifoldness is created out of oneness. What results is hybrid organics that float in a twilight world between imagined and observed reality…forms in constant flux, in a state of continuous transformation. They could be denizens of a science-fictional botanical garden, specimens in a bizarre cabinet of curiosity or portents of a distant future.
She draws upon and morphs diverse elements of the botanical, zoological, human, and mechanical realms; machine, animal, flesh, plant, basically different elements - organic and inorganic – that all combine to fashion a hybrid with obscure antecedents. The outcome is somewhat unclassifiable, a category unto itself. Principles of growth, its rhythms, patterns, and tensions form core of her primary artistic concerns.
Among the important awards and residencies she has won are the INLAKS Fine Art Award and the KHOJ International Residency that she describes an exciting experience offering her a chance to interact with contemporaries from various disciplines and geographies and providing an insight into their ideology and practices.
On her part, the artist has been trying to explore some ideas put forward in Goethe’s Botanical writings in which Goethe’s search for “that which was common to all plants without distinction” led him to evolve a purely mental concept of the archetypal plant. This archetype, when translated into art by some of his followers, resulted in what one writer has described as a ‘botanists’ nightmare’ consisting of all known leaves and flowers combined around a single stem.
For example, in her debut solo, entitled ‘Breed’, she engaged artistically with Goethe’s idea of the archetypal plant. This archetype or ‘Urpflanze’ describes’ - one basic form that manifests in the multitude of single plant individuals- harbors the potential for endless transformation, by which manifoldness is created out of oneness. What results is hybrid organics that float in a twilight world between imagined and observed reality…forms in constant flux, in a state of continuous transformation. They could be denizens of a science-fictional botanical garden, specimens in a bizarre cabinet of curiosity or portents of a distant future.
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