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| Natasha N Displaying her works before presentation |
Diaspora plays a significant role for many critical and
creative minds. Artist Natasha Narain who spends several years away from her
homeland and working across the geographical boundaries deals with emotional
issues connected to her subjective feelings in a distinctive manner. On 26th
December 2015, she presented her works, memories and developed a dialogue with
a bunch of contemporary artists and art enthusiasts at Nine Schools of Art, New
Delhi under a program named as 'Dialogic'.
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| "Preserving Secrets" Artist's Book |
Natasha N is an Indian-Australian artist and researcher engaged
in exploring how interdisciplinary practice can inhabit a space between
culturally designated art forms, linking traditions as shared psychological and
social conduits. Her process is an eclectic reawakening of personal and
cultural memory, turning both inside out, as a means to engender cathartic
healing whilst crisscrossing geo-political boundaries. |
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| Art Work with everyday objects |
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| "My art one have to touch and intimate", "Preserving Secrets" Artist's Book |
This Indian-Australian artist spent over twenty years in both places
and then some in the U.K. Her work thus traverses past boundaries set by geo
political maps, painting in colours from
her heritage and drawing on memory of
places, patterns, events and issues of the past, that continue unresolved
amidst enforced migration and trauma
faced by women and children, today.
She started making artist books when she chanced upon a copy of E.M.
Foster’s Passage to India in 2011, in Brisbane. In attempting to re-read
and appreciate the visual imagery and
thoughts just as she had in my sixteenth year in India, she failed and found herself
questioning what now came across as a colonial looking from ‘above’ instead of
and from the people, albeit with beautiful
prose.
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| Work on Canvas |
In her presentation at Nine Schools of Art she displays a traditional
Kantha from Bengal and narrates the process of making the quilt or Kantha. She
also goes through a visual presentation with art historical evidences. She
focuses on the physicality of involvement of rural women, collective conscious
behind the motifs and also explains how the Kantha or quilt is just a part of
their everyday lives. By the process and uses Kantha weaves out not only torn
cloths and threads but also memories. At the same time it also refer to a
sustainable practice where old and torn cloths get a new life along with
warmth. From there onwards she adopts a method of weaving out her own visual
memories and starts making her own art works. She also makes some memory books.
Those are visually rich with colours and textures. She feels that art is for
touch, and not aloof from everyday life. Thus she makes artist's book which are
meant to be picked up, overleaf and feel the textures. In her works it is not
written- 'Please do not touch the art work'.
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| Artist's Book |
Though she takes inspiration from a traditional practice like Kantha,
Natasha makes her works with her own idiom, also innovates new methods, making
it a contemporary practice. Her visual experiments go with paintings on large
scaled canvas, photography, collages and artist's books. Her paintings also use
collage. The artist's statement says, "The images I collage in, refer to
humanitarian issues that confront our world today. In particular, I seek to
nurture the lives of children within displacement, conflict and social
hierarchy, in an unequal world".
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| Natasha N at 'Dialogic', Nine Schools of Art |
Likewise, Photographs play a crucial role in her practise. She takes
as well as gathers images that can address migration, families and communities,
that are stateless, narrative, sometimes of the body, or within bodies the
x-ray images that connect us. In her words, "The microcosms within larger
macrocosms".
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| Natasha N at 'Dialogic', Nine Schools of Art |
"I found myself circling words and masking others, soaking pages
in tea bags of memories and then painting over to find myself gently tearing
out, reconstructing, questioning simultaneously my own identity and heritage
within the passages" Natasha says.
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| Natasha N at 'Dialogic', Nine Schools of Art |
"I continued onto other books, selecting ones that were beautiful
objects but devalued and discarded. In transforming them into artist’s books, I
sought to heal by rejuvenating their loss of place, identity and voice. The
methods employed were violent in the cutting, tearing, and sewing but mirrored
assimilation, loss and renewal".
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| Natasha N at 'Dialogic', Nine Schools of Art |
On her own involvement and enjoyment she also says, "The books
allowed me play, within pages kept secret, extending my skills by allowing new
marks, accidents, collaged in solutions
that carried themselves over to the larger paintings, seamlessly connecting the
whole".
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| Poster invites for Dialogic |
'Dialogic' at Nine Schools of Art is a monthly session with creative
and critical minds. The artists' presentation followed by discussion, debate
and conversations open up newer dialogues into the contemporary discourses.
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| Artist Natasha N |
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| Poster invites for Dialogic |
*Reportage by Tetangkush
