Review

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Of material and the ‘stitched word’

Art writer Akansha Rastogi traces the excesses and aesthetic in the works of Rakhi Peswani, drawing upon the works included in her solo exhibition, ‘Intertwinings,’ held at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi.

The solo exhibition, ‘Intertwinings,’ of Rakhi Peswani, recipient of the FICA Emerging Artist Award (2007), at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi is a visually stimulating show. She plays with the material – cloth, thread, needle, appliqué work, safety pins, wire, scissor, band-aid – as she delves into the process and the act of creation itself. She weaves the pauses in the creative process with works such as ‘Poetics of Desire – the Birth of Language.’

In her works the act of creation is a melancholic, isolated exercise where the games of perception and deception are played with one’s self and with others. Mind games are a constant. Rakhi thus allocates herself the task of annotating not what one creates but what gets processed under. She uses the middle age European personifications of ‘melancholia’ – a disease / state of mind often associated with court poets or the creative minds (not to forget the Shakespearean long soliloquy on melancholy in ‘As You Like It’); ‘insomnia’ in her works again refers to a state of restlessness, night vampires visit in the twilight or darkness, these demons of the night enter the shroud and worsen the sickness of the mind and heart. She digs into the mutations that take place during these moments though the act remains enveloped in mystery. One enters a world of woven demons that cluster the mind. The gestural hands in her work are both the creator and used as mimes. The display of the exhibition is fresh with a coherent strand binding it. However, the romantic versions of the creative act questioned in the exhibition are adhered to as an end with no vigilance of the mind taking charge of the illusions. What she at times achieves is a complex negation. In the next part of the review I try to analyse why possibly this could be happening.

Of Material

Politics of the medium – the mode, its representational strategies and dissemination – is usually discussed in the case of New Media Art, Performance Art or Digital and technologically empowered media. I invoke this discussion to highlight how Rakhi mediates through the use of various materials in her works.

Given Rakhi’s association with the traditional crafts, she revitalises the home-bound, ‘private’ medium of tailoring, stitching, and appliqué work. Here, by ‘private’ I imply its traditional use as an art-form taught to young girls as a guna, and now treated as a skill through which women can find self-employment. Thus, Rakhi politically empowers the material to converse in a new objective terrain (also important is the fact from her generation/ batch other artists have also chosen to explore this medium) where the material is re-employed, differently from its normal usage. She sometimes strategically exploits the tactile aspect / charm of these many material (fur, band-aid, nylon hair, scissor, wire, safety pin, different types of cloth - velvet, cotton, soft towel type, thread) to feed an image. However, my concern here is the excess and the aesthetic in Rakhi’s works. Handling multiplicity of the material to give an aesthetic experience is a task, and that’s where I think the works are lacking. For example, when she uses towel-cloth as the ground for her work, it is already a personal utilitarian good in our daily lives, and it is from this point that the conversation begins. It becomes the first marker of audience’s identification. Though the surface of the cloth is punctured, and stitched with figures, the tactile aspect overtakes the images, and thus the artwork in totality looses itself because of the excess. The problem is her failure in the economic use of the material, wherein the character / nature of the material should serve the coherency of the work, and not exist independently out of the frame. Resultantly, the aesthetic conflict that enlivens a work is not there, leaving the artwork as only a seductive visual inept in producing any kind of constructive dialogues or field. It fails much terribly in works such as ‘Misnomers (Reconstructing the Body) in 10 Panels.’

There are embedded references and symbolism within the objects that Rakhi chooses to play with – the all-watching eye, the mirror, the scissor that cuts, the safety pin that heals. The thread present as stitches or marks on the cloth-canvas also exist as independent images (thread and the needle), potent agents that duly reflect on the act of creation. Also the gendered connotations of all these objects add another dimension to their performativity. Given this personal symbolism evolved by the artist, the work such as ‘As You Sew – Some Notes on the Magic of Making,’ engages directly with the materiality of existence.

Of ‘the Stitched Word’

The act of stitching has inescapable relation to the realm of the feminine. Rakhi’s indulgence in using text / the written word as visual reminds one of Rene Magritte’s critical engagement in ‘This is Not a Pipe’ with ‘resemblance,’ ‘representation,’ ‘copy’ which involves immediate subversion of the familiar. However, in Rakhi’s works, the stitched word functions doubly – sometimes as annotations to dwell on the ‘drawn/embroidered’ visual, and sometimes as a self-contained visual itself.

The first displayed work in the exhibition ‘Poetics of Desire – the Birth of Language,’ uses the words ‘Essence,’ ‘Absence,’ ‘Presence’ fragmented as alphabets that resonate differential. Rakhi is sensitive to the arbitrariness of the ‘signs’ – the words, its meaning, and a state of meaninglessness. She juxtaposes these signs with visual images of a magical bottle (a container), a human face with strained gaze in sync with the horizontality of the cloth-canvas it inhabits (the contained) and a Victorian angel plagued by demons of Goya’s melancholy. With every stitch being different from the other, such as the ‘prick’ and ‘trick’ in the work ‘On the Rules of the Game,’ and ‘home’ in the work ‘Misnomers,’ her explorations trace the relationship between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified,’ the duality of action and meaning. In the work ‘Anatomical Construction of Ideas,’ she uses mirror sequin to write ‘Reflection.’ The mirror-sequin reflects one’s own ‘fragmented’ image that I see as a situation resistant to the possibility of becoming the ground of mediation because of the constant return of the gaze. The work reflects back the viewer’s attempt of ‘looking at.’ But the problematic aspect here is that the coherency of the written word remains unpunctured in the schema of text as visual / visual as text. Nonetheless, the exhibition ‘Intertwinings’ showed the best of Rakhi’s work and practice, and it will be interesting to trace her journey.

(Akansha Rastogi is an art writer based in New Delhi. Email: rastogi.akansha@gmail.com)