Being born in a small, rural district in the north part of Bangladesh, my childhood can be narrated as episodes outlined by rigorous discipline and control. Inarguably so, the desire was always to be independent be it from the clutches of my mother’s reproach, or from the expectations at school.
When I came to Santiniketan as a student, the picturesque town both nourished me, when I was caught in the rapture of independence, and also challenged me, when I received the news of my mother’s untimely demise. For a while, in nature I saw but a vast sea of emptiness. I reconciled my own loss with what I saw in nature; how its remnants are not lost but quite simply reborn.This is how I began not painting, but documenting, observing, understanding. Most of this process happens out of my control. The result is at best accidental. I’d like to think that my art tells a tale of both control and accident, echoing a principle of life itself. Once I began my training in art, it was through my newly evolved vocabulary that I found reprieve. Steaming through a ruthless wave of time, I try to make art a little more sensitive. As I transform everyday materials and those associated with rituals and history, the emphasis is on hand worked processes. Oftentimes engaging in a play of absurdity, I have also used architectural and terracotta mould, cotton-pulp, human-hair, snake-skin and a slew of other discarded ephemerals. I then began creating my own paper from using pastes of flower based pulp, News paper recycled pulp and extracting colour from el- ements such as flower, bark, seed, leaf, sometimes stone and clay. However, creating is nothing but a violent process of making. Something that an artist must come to terms with at some point in their journey. For me, it was through loss. I do not paint; I quite simply make. The fleeting ephemeralities of nature have long since fascinated me. I often asked myself, how can I translate this materiality of nature onto my work, when it refuses to be tamed or controlled as per one’s will? To this extent, I have adopted an almost archival, quasi scientific method of categorizing and documenting various hues, forms, textures, surfaces, as well as materials such as clay, coal, graphite, pulp made from newspapers (to demolish written language and establish visual language), and a slew of other discarded ephemera found in nature all in pursuit of understanding its materiality. Simultaneously archiveing the process and the source substances. My respect for traditional ways of life is borne out in the handmade objects and many of these elements are like fossils to me. I am influenced by historical figures such as the engineer and architect Buckminster Fuller and utopian visions of a self sustaining, egalitarian society. My recent works draw on ideas expressed in Fuller’s book Grunch of Giants and the formal characteristics of cartographer, architect Bernard J. S. Cahill’s Butterfly map and Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapience” book, which then merges with my own artistic language and world view. My interest in cosmology and imaginative cartography is inherently connected with pressing concerns around income and resource inequality. A space without a ship alludes to Fuller’s concept of ‘Spaceship Earth’, a phrase Fuller used to describe the entire planet. In this case however, the title implies that our trajectory is adrift, as we forge ahead without adequate care for the planet itself or humanity. My work advocates, as Fuller did, for a collective rebalancing, or global cooperation around human intelligence and the earth’s resources, in a way that allows for an ‘integrated regenerative system’.