Artist Neerja Kothari Transcends Pain into Art

KOCHI:
During the practice sessions at art school, Neerja Kothari organically started reducing her imageries into dots, circles and numbers. This made her think about why is she counting when her mind is empty and drawing. It took her to her rehabilitation days while surviving a motor sensory neuropathy where she used to always break down everything into numbers and time and her childhood with games on numbers and dots. All these life experiences came together in her work showcased at the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022 at AspinWall House, Fort Kochi.

“I do what I know the best and truest to me,” says the artist who used ink, graphite drawings and typewritten text to transform the body into a measuring instrument. Her work included in Kochi-Muziris Biennale are titled ‘An Investigation of a Lyrical Movement by the Self (80330)’, ‘manuscript for a Book of Time (to be written)’, ‘gesture by the healing sounds of the singing bowls (15636)’, ‘silent gestures once the music stops’, ‘gesture by the last vibration of the singing bowls (6352)’, ‘gathering evidence on one’s trace (5900)’ and ‘coming apart (1765)’.

Neerja’s experience of time is different from the experiences of those who live without physical disabilities. To create her work, the artist drew with graphite while walking to music and then numbered each speck of powder, creating and ‘labelling’ an archive of gestures, of the body moving in time.

“Though my rehabilitation days were between 2001 and 2006 where exercises and repetitions were constantly counted, time used to be marked, the reminiscence of it came out organically as numbers when I started sitting to work,” she says.

Every day is a struggle for the artist who finds art as a solace and escape route from pain. “I now live with the pain. Making art grounds me and it takes me away from this full-time job of taking care of myself. There are days when I am really tired and difficult and on the other days I sit and put everything I feel onto the canvas,” she says.

Now, Neerja’s work is more of a mixture of the past and the present. “All my work has been speaking to each other over the past ten years,” she sums up.