KMB Artist Ratna Gupta Explores Memories, Ephemerality, and Passage of Time

KOCHI:
Memories relive through her art. And her personal idioms turn into universal realities. Mumbai-based artist Ratna Gupta’s work seems to bridge the gap between the subjective and object in abstract and concrete ways. She has threaded three kinds of work — embroidered paintings; tapestries and sculptures— that sort of accommodate the seeming differences, contradictions, and similarities. Almost saying that life is about manoeuvring though these paradoxes.

On crossing the threshold of the first-floor room in the Director’s Bungalow, Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi, at the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), viewers encounter small sculptures on a podium that trigger curiosity. Each distinct, distant yet sharing the same platform and connected in a way posing questions and leaving the answers to viewers. “The sculptures are made of the things I pick up during my street walks, could be a sort of souvenir of the moment. It is a joy to place them randomly or join them meaningfully giving importance to the material, some even decaying, repelling a few. They are like human relationship, very sensitive and delicate and needs care. Most sculptures are broken during transport into new forms and narratives. It kind of speaks about the fragility, ephemerality of life that keeps changing and breaking into new forms. My work is personal as well as political as we all have shared experiences and people find their stories in my art,” said Ratna Gupta aptly naming her sculpture work, Everything is Precious.

Preciousness lies in each one’s perspective of things The sculptures comprising twigs on a stone pedestal, lamp-like drift wood, needle-shaped delicate wood with a thread sticking on; cradle-like cone piece, brush-like root, recycled and upcycled plastic and pipe and more can be interpreted in umpteen ways. Some of them undergo changes and Gupta creates change to them as well. “The sculptures are playful, naughty and joyous while the drawings and knit work speak tales of sorrow, each supporting the other, and I need to do both,” she said.

Gupta has stitched many a story on her drawings on paper giving them new meanings. One frame has a tiny house with a labyrinthine thread work; another a swarm of insects; butterflies in another; a fading tree, one seems to be a blast-like destruction with a red tinge. Changing landscapes, mostly greyish with stitches in streaks of red or black. Some are layered with stitches wall-like or cage-like. The dark shades speak of divisions, war, destruction, and misery. “That’s the dream house that we built after years of work. It is sad to see many homeless today and many likely to lose homes. I have portrayed the fireflies that I noticed one night near our home and the butterflies too. They play important roles in life despite their short span and decay into oblivion,” Her works hint at death, the inclination for repetition, the needle work that people do ritualistically or the knitting.

Her paintings are a kind of diaries. Behind each drawing words have much to say, may be a tiff with her husband, a chat with her daughter or just frustrations about the happenings around, helplessness and hope. Each work is a document of histories within and outside.

She prefers to call her work, ‘As I make, I watch time pass me by’. “Needle, both the sewing and knitting, are part of my work, languages of repetition, of joining, connecting into a whole. While the sewing needle finds a place in her studio, knitting is for home. “Knitting is something domestic, of motherhood and a time to sit still and watch the work expand, depicting the flow of time and the changes in the body and around. I knit with any discarded or found material — wires, wool, plastic or anything knittable. It’s a form of protest too when I am impatient to get to my studio,” she said. The knitwork adorn a wall dress-like or tapestry-like in hues hidden with stories.

“The sewing needle is important to me as the knitting. Besides mending, it’s a form of resistance. It pricks, awakening me to the realities around and the need to connect,” she said. Well, the works help viewers connect the dots and thread their views in thought-provoking ways.