Kavita Jaiswal has titled her recent suite of works No Beginning, No End and indeed, with the labyrinth of what appears to be a mesh of nestling lines and intricate details, the artist leaves us wondering as to how she arrives successfully at a desired image, through a vision of such an assembled reality. Indeed, Kavita’s work and artistic journey is an intensely personal one that belies the need for positioning her art practice into any established canon or category. But what does Kavita really try to address in these works? What does she arrive at? What kinds of evocations and associations come to mind while engaging her imagery?

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The artist is certainly not interested in the obvious, neither in the fixity of recognizable objects nor in the descriptive elements of known entities. Instead, I would contend that Kavita is inspired by the moving force in living things, primarily in the metamorphosis of nature-inspired forms as well as the vulnerability of the human body as it changes and ages. The visual image in her art making keeps developing, gradually becoming and shaping and yet holding some secrets within.

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Interestingly, one finds her attentive to the silent but continual flow of life while working towards subconscious sublimations in her art making. She creates abstract forms that seem to be entwined in varied states of awakening.

 

The interplay between her most preferred materials-ink, acrylic, conte, crayons and paper offers us this fluid imagery that captures the active transcendence between the self and the on-going situations in life. Kavita Jaiswal’s solo exhibitions over the years have been titled Subconscious Excavations (1999), Silent Moments(2002), Cognizance (2005), and Magical Kingdom (2008), as a part of a group exhibition and book Dus Mahavidyas and they highlight the artist’s personal belief in ‘art as an emergence’ rather than as something depicted and transcribed. There is no deliberate effort to choose themes, forms and methods of working. In fact the artist’s mind reveals her appetite for imaginative explorations and clairvoyant moments. It has taken her considerable time to arrive at a state of inward attentiveness that opens up realms of the subconscious that aren’t so easy to access.

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In these works, outward appearances have certainly made way for something deeper, as Kavita goes inward, often withdrawing from the world and slipping into moments of silent reflection. While some of the recent works evoke associations with human body–parts such as lungs, capillaries, spinal cord and vertebrae, they also capture blotches of blood and delicate veins. De-contoured and sliced open, Kavita seems to be drawn more and more to the “body-interior”. The nuanced tones of water and blood seem to be flowing into one another, sometimes in states of dilution, or else frozen at other times. There is perhaps a need to heal within, to resist disintegration and mend the inner self.

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After graduating in English literature, Kavita wilfully chose to enrol at the Triveni Kala Sangam in New Delhi to pursue Fine Arts. With the veteran artist Rameshwar Broota as her teacher, Kavita was drawn to her mentor’s interest in the expressivity of the human body, not merely as an object to be transcribed but imaged in its intricate details as well as its traces. Though Kavita began her training comprehending the contours of the human figure and the exploration of its visual form, she soon moved on to imprints, vestiges and abstract configurations that evoked symbolic associations with the human body. She was not fixated to any particular entity, but specific details that were intriguing in their visuality. She was inspired by women artists such as Nasreen Mohamedi and Zarina Hashmi for their sparse aesthetics and poetic sensibilities as well as their affinity to paper as a medium. Kavita too, has been drawn less to the medium of oil on canvas, and finds the responsiveness of paper most appealing. It is also most suited to delicate imprints, stains and smudges that are absorbed and get embedded within its substance.

 

Her hand-driven aesthetics aligned to the touch and feel of her materials is articulated through a sequence of creative acts that layer her floating imagery, anchoring it by lines, dots and collaged pieces, sometimes retrieved from her early prints. These layers demand intermittent working taking into consideration the temperament of her varied mediums, the level of moistness and dryness of the paper, when and how to dig and scratch into its corporeal base and when to tear or embed the torn patches on to the surface.

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One can sense that Kavita has found a certain joy and challenge in experimenting with this readiness of the paper, laying it flat and spilling water on it, seesawing the sheet of paper to slurry the watery routes, navigating interesting marks and tonal shapes before the excesses are soaked into the paper. Even the loaded brush is made to gently breathe on the moist paper and release ink to leave soft marks and smudges on the surface. The muted tones may look like a chance spilling of diluted acrylic or ink that take on surreal shapes and dribbles. Weaving the informal assembly of marks and shreds, Kavita uses line drawing to hold and stitch the unhemmed formal structure.

 

The contrasts between tonality and linearity are sensibly played out with line becoming the life-force, the primary tool to hold space and form together. Acquiring an independent existence, line functions less as a rendering tool and matures to become a means to express inner feelings, emotional states, darkest fears and silent hopes.
 

The instantly felt spontaneity in her work is quite misleading for Kavita’s art making is not devoid of thought and intuitive articulation. Every image is arrived at through deep reflection, control and coordination. Her recent works and their intense mode of making, test the resilience of matter against its own fragility.

 

This raw vulnerability is achieved through the tactility of materials that she employs. For instance, the chosen paper can be pinched, gouged, shredded, crushed, stitched and glued; all acts that help her enhance textures and shapes that evoke metaphors for matter in transition. For instance, dry leaves that are crisp yet so fragile with only a tracery of lines/veins, the hollowed-out bark, half-eaten plants, veins and nerves of the human body and organs that facilitate breathing, all resonate in her imagery.

 

The irregular shapes patched with their vulnerable edges become a powerful detail when seen against minute scribbles that echo patterns on the barren earth or sand. She crushes paper in many different ways to arrive at desirable textures that come close to the interior network and wired body system. Often, the wire mesh and plaster is stitched on to paper with copper wire or collaged with fragments of her old prints, the artist becoming a bricoleur using on-specialized tools to serve a variety of purposes.

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In her art making, Kavita transcends the immediate to grasp that which is more elusive and intangible.

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Exploding, dismantling and a careful reconfiguring are all part of a preoccupation with the notion of temporality and time. Perhaps more than anything, there is a desire to heal within, to resist disintegration and mend the inner self. It seems that for the artist, the unresolved nature of life itself triggers the move away from a single perspectival view of it. She intends to unsettle the viewer who encounters her delicate but edgy compositions that visually move in and out of the boundaries of space and time.

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Enchanted by the creative process, for Kavita, art, like life, must be enjoyed in its making.