This time, the second time I have come,
I dream no more the vastness.
With hands behind my back,
I walk from one end to the other
I am thinking —
How can so slight a thread tie up a city?
Lin Ling
What began as a space of intimate connection with myself during the short spans of time I’d spend painting in Bombay, while the rest of the day saw me in a desk job, opened up what seemed like an endless sequence of a visual dialogue from one painting to the next. Walking back home everyday through the crowded streets of south Bombay, I was impacted by an unabashedly intense experience where ideas of public and private, home and outside are all blurred into one. The sights, noises, smells and random voices of passers-by whose home is under the vast sky and whose company is the clatter from the street, became a stimulus that I could only respond to through painting. The small scale of the works from the series ‘Threading the City’ are a result of both circumstance and choice, where the sequencing of paintings becomes a metaphor for every day’s record of experience in a city. The Chinese poem by Lin Ling echoes this experience while carrying the metaphor further into a space of introspection with humanness at its core.
The works can be viewed here.
Malavika Rajnarayan 