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Domestic Memories

Sojwal Samant’s latest exhibition is presented by Gallery Espace, New Delhi. In the catalogue essay, art historian, Kavita Singh says that the artist turns her personal experience into aesthetical and political expressions. Singh weaves in artist’s biographical anecdotes to explain Samant’s works.

Sojwal Samant’s new work speaks in whispers. It asks you to look not for lines and colours and forms but for the softest undulations on the surface, a hairline crack, a single filament come loose from the depths.

Years ago, Sojwal was a bright young thing in Baroda, making witty, cheeky sculptures in a range of media. An aquarium full of staring eyes, a shimmering bead-curtain man, a bronze balloon… her work switched easily from medium to medium, producing startling puns and uneasy metaphors. Today her work is far removed from her earlier smart and even strident conceptualism. Instead, it single-mindedly explores one material at a time, and it is so subtle that it verges on invisibility.

What could explain this metamorphosis of her artistic personality? The artist points to her daughter, Maya, a four-year-old elf who pirouettes about the room in a succession of pink shoes. Four years of motherhood for Sojwal, four years of an intense love that focuses obsessively on one centre, four years of staying home and washing and cleaning and ironing and folding, closing the window against germs, boiling the water, scrubbing the vegetables, trimming the meat. This is what it is to forget yourself and to live for someone, something, else. This is what it is to feel joy, terror and numbness coming from the same thing.

In these years, what does she see? A bedsheet that has to be folded just so. A dress with a new three-cornered tear. A sweater that has begun to unravel. Tea stains on the kitchen cloth. The fabrics that she scrutinizes everyday for new stains and rips become like landscapes to her. When she tries, after some years, to sculpt again, these are the images that fill her vision. Slowly, they become the visual register of her work. By dwelling on them, she realises she can communicate a new kind of seeing that has become her own. It is a vision attuned to paying attention to the smallest detail; the perception of subtle shifts that occur even within a monochrome. If on the one hand, Sojwal invites us to see with her own slowed-down and subtle vision, she also asks us, on the other hand, to see her seeing-with-this-vision. It is an invitation not just to share her experience, but also to recognize its obsessiveness. In this, she manages to stand both inside and outside herself, conveying her own subjectivity and ruthlessly analysing it.

Most of the works in this show are made by laying paper pulp onto sheets of wire mesh. What results looks like fabric, but is stiff enough to retain the form that the artist has given it. In one, there is a crumple, in another, a tear, and in a third, the marks that are left when cloth has been folded again and again. These small crinkles and furrows make the work hover somewhere between surface and solid form. In fact, Sojwal says, she herself was conscious of producing something that she could not name: is this painting or sculpture? She cannot say.

Sojwal’s use of paper pulp inevitably recalls the work of Somenath Hore, memorably, his great paper pulp prints from the ‘Wounds’ series in which smooth blank paper turned into a suppurating sore. Seen against his lifelong political commitment, Hore’s ‘Wounds’ which could have been remembered simply as an abstract play with his medium, became yet another expression of his anguish about the human condition. In ‘Bile’, we have a paper pulp work from Sojwal that most closely resembles Hore’s ‘Wounds’ prints. However, unlike Hore, here Sojwal is inspired by a banal domestic event. On a surface covered with nested rectangles, an irregular, frothing blob interrupts the precise mathematical form. The splodge seems like a violation of the orderly line, and one is tempted to meditate on the different orders of form that seem to be at war with each other. The logic of the grid vs. the irregular, organic shape; design vs. accident. All this is appropriate, but the fact is also that the work was prompted by the artist’s memory of her dog’s vomit on the rug. 

In carefully re-creating the bile on the rug, which in life she would have washed away, or constructing the tear in the sheet, that at home she would have mended, or making the pulled thread that she would have cut off from her garment, Sojwal observes that she is re-doing, sculpturally, what she is constantly un-doing at home. There is a sense of the Sisyphean nature of domestic work: every day you roll the stone up the hill, and then it rolls back down; you wash the clothes, and they get dirtied, you iron the sheets, and they are crumpled again. But it is also a self-discipline to live with and work through the dirt and damage that she has obsessively been countering these past years, for, as she understands, her obsession with order is itself a kind of disorder.

In ‘Undertow’ we have another sculpted sheet, this one recalling a single thread pulled loose from the weave, perhaps to begin the unravelling of the fabric itself. The pulled thread here is a wire unpicked from the underlying mesh, springing tensely to the surface. It is a wire or a thread but it is also a nerve drawn out from the spine – an analogy that is reinforced by the puckering of the ‘fabric’ on either side of the pulled thread, which resembles a ridge of vertebrae. The sheet becomes the skin of a body flayed and spread out for examination, a body flattened the way a Mercator projection flattens the globe.

Map-making is in fact one of the forms of visual abstraction that interests Sojwal. She notes the relationship between marks on a surface and places in the real world; the laconic signifier for such a massive signified; the flattening of the sphere of the globe into the map’s plane. ‘Unfolded Boundaries’ bears the criss-cross fold-marks of a sheet of paper that has been used to form an origami ball. Opened out, it has now gone from globe to map and shifts in the tones of grey signify landmasses and oceans. The variations of tone, now accentuated with weak solutions of tea and whiting powder, first became apparent to Sojwal when she noticed that there was always a slight shift in the shade of the paper pulp that she laid down on successive days, and a hairline that marked the juncture of one day’s paper pulp and the next. Line and form began to appear on the sheets, unbidden, and the forms began to suggest maps to her.

The graded variations between different days’ paper pulp is reminiscent of a feature of the fresco buono technique, in which the mural painter lays down the plaster for the area of wall that he will paint that day, so that the wet plaster can soak in the paint and make a long-lasting fresco. It was used extensively in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and art historians today study the imperceptible joins in the plaster to calculate the number of days that a mural took. One can similarly study Sojwal’s work and through the variations in its tone find out how long she worked upon it. The mark becomes time as well as form, and in work that looks as far removed from the biographical as possible, you find that the artist has left a little imprint of her life.

Temporality is a recurrent if subterranean theme in this artist’ work. The wooden sculptures that she makes from lateral or longitudinal slices of a tree trunk play with the annular rings, themselves the mark of time. Sometimes she carves along the ring’s ridges, deepening nature’s marks, and sometimes she cuts them away, making the ‘life’ of the tree shallower than it was. But her interventions are subtle: one wonders, are the hollows in the heart of the trunk natural, or carved by the artist?  It is as though Sojwal has penetrated into the tree and occupied its core, altered its biography, even.

There is something feminine in this tactic of gentle occupation, and also in the repeated, ruminative abstractions from domestic objects. But if we see this as work by a woman artist, the question is how shall we characterize it as such? It is a commonplace to speak of the art made by women as slow, repetitive, obsessive, as though it was domestic work of another kind. The truth is that most art, made by men, women, or anyone else, is a slow, repetitive and obsessive thing. It is just that women also do domestic work, and sometimes they take something from that experience back into their art as well.

(Essay courtesy Gallery Espace, New Delhi and Kavita Singh)