Beyond Painting

I am an award-winning feminist poet, artist, academician and educator. I am largely self-taught in art, barring my elective studio art classes in school which opened me up to some new possibilities and sharpened older ones. I have been playing with lines and colours since as long as I can remember. My art, unlike my academic writing and research, is largely pleasure-driven, visceral and an uncharted process of play which is guided by a non-conscious self and imagination, partly fuelled by my age-old relationship with literature and my quest for experiencing my emotions or being with my 'self'. I never decide what I want to create- I let the medium, mood and texture of the given situation shape my work, suspending conscious and structured thought for the time. While that is the process and style of creation, given that my creative and critical interests centre on questions of the body, identity and the politics of the visual embedded in gender theory, feminism, post-colonialism and cinema studies, my art work quite naturally, overlaps with much of what I read, write and think through but in an unmapped manner and it is difficult and undesirable to wonder which informs which- only that they intertwine in exciting ways that propel and contest the possibilities of both fields. My art, like my poetic writing, borrows from imprints of childhood memories, of growing up in Orissa where my mother painted symbolic feet by the doorway for goddess laxmi to enter as I watched her closely, (the shape of that foot occurs like a leitmotif in my paintings often) of adolescent love and injury and the struggles and thrill of living in cities packed with contradictions like Cairo, Bombay and Delhi. My art reflects my paradoxical need for movement and a hunger for (impossible) stasis, a fact and habit of a life lived in travel, both physically and metaphorically.