An Artist Residency in Motherhood, Winter 2022

It has been almost two years since the pandemic began. When I look back at photographs from 2020, it seems like a lifetime ago. My son was two years old then. Now he is four, a vastly different stage in his life. So much has happened in these two years, and yet everything seems to have paused. It feels reductive to say that it’s been a rough two years being a parent and an artist; it’s been rough for everyone in one way or another. I am blurry-eyed, tired to the bone, and frayed at the edges. But I’ve also been transformed for the better by the time I’ve spent with my child.

My work has felt the impact of the pandemic. For the first few months, my studio practice was at a standstill. I was between studios and exhausted by the long days. I then got the keys to the studio, but it took a while to gain access and move all my things. Everything took more time than usual, and long gaps between work sessions emerged before my eyes. By the spring of 2021, it was clear that I had to adapt to the situation. It seemed impossible to consider working at night after a full day with my son, not to mention that I was also exhibiting and teaching regularly, and doing all the ancillary work that artists do. All I wanted to do was throw a blanket over myself. But I made a start and began working in the studio four nights a week. These night shifts in the studio have now become something I look forward to, no matter how much I manage to do.

A few months ago, I began working on a new body of work called ‘A Wedge of Darkness.’ The title comes from Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse.’ This collection builds on the work I have been doing for many years. It’s been in the works for a while, but I began articulating my thoughts only recently. Given the fragmented nature of my studio practice, I have decided to do a two-month long self-directed residency. Unlike a regular residency I will be working in my studio given all the current uncertainties of the pandemic. I will be doing this residency under the auspices of ‘An Artist Residency in Motherhood,’ created by Lenka Clayton. The ARiM aims to be “…a self-directed, open-source artist residency to empower and inspire artists who are also mothers.” This residency seems apt given the circumstances. I am looking forward to this residency even though uncertainty looms. I hope this to be an opportunity to inhabit a different state of mind after almost two years of being in a state of flux. Will this residency spark new connections and forge the way ahead? I hope it will.

reflecting on a painting

Something I wrote last year...

I have a painting in front of me. Not on the wall, but stacked up against my other finished canvases. I keep this particular piece there so that I can look at it whenever I work in this space. It is no longer "a painting I made". It now has a personality outside of me. The painting seems to echo something from deep within. I feel a little melancholic, yet elated; both at the same time. I feel a certain limbo when I look at the painting; suspended, in a place that’s neither here nor there. (Enroute?) I stare ahead of me, in this moment of rest where all else falls away. I imagine my line of sight to be perched high up on a mountain. Something about the angle jogs a physical memory. (I sense/ smell rain.) From this vantage point, the horizon is below me, and is a wide sweep of land. As I write these words — wide sweep of land — I feel a physical sensation again. I feel cradled. Alone, yet secure. I feel the distance of a journey. Where am I going? I’m not sure. I am neither excited nor reluctant to reach. Instead I am immersed in that moment. I feel at home right there, in the middle of nowhere. 

looking out/ looking in (part III): notes from the ordinary

The previous post was an homage to the question about gazing outward to look inward. The third and final assignment was to look at how this question shows up in the day-to-day. Here is what I wrote.

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I The pulse of ordinary life: 

Half asleep, I could hear a steady sound: ksshhhhhhhhhh 

(air conditioning? cars whizzing somewhere?). 

I thought of John Cage, in an anechoic chamber, realising there is no such thing 

as real silence.*

II Extraordinary ordinariness: 

The evening light on the dining table was liquid gold. Crumbs cast long shadows. 

Andrew Wyeth’s work came to mind: The Blue Door; dark recesses of the shed, radiant light on the door. 

Not a ‘perfect’ beauty, but an imperfect one. 

Wabi sabi.

III Eternity on the wall: 

The sun sets on the same wall each day 

regardless of the season. It’s a big window and a big wall. 

If the house were to live for an eternity, we can safely assume that the evening sun will 

always fall on that wall. 

IV White light flight: 

My eye caught a flock of white birds flying north. 

They seemed to be flying in slow motion; their bodies glistening with each flap of their wings. 

The monumental in the most ordinary of sights. 

Their formation looked like this:

 |> |> |> |> 

    |> |> |> |>  |> |>

|> |> |> |>

      |> |> 

      |>

V Chop wood, carry water: 

Most days look like this: 

wake up, shower, breakfast, work, lunch, work, coffee, dinner, sleep. Repeat. 

I wonder what it all means.

Zen masters say chop wood, carry water. 

VI The fruits of insight: 

Cézanne’s fruits vibrate with a palpable energy. 

I look at the fruit in my kitchen; 

the plums have to go. 

Life, even in death, is full of life.

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*  Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats, John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists, 2012. Note: In the anechoic chamber (which blocks all external sounds), Cage heard two sounds, a dull roar and a high whine that came his body. The first was blood rushing through veins. The second was the firing of neurons. Larson says, “In the anechoic chamber, Cage sought perfect silence and instead found the pulse of ordinary life.”

looking out/ looking in (part II): a view of the horizon

the wall (absent)
acrylic on canvas, 36x48", 2019, © priya vadhyar

Continuing from the previous post, the second assignment was about writing an homage to the theoretical question distilled from the art review. We were asked to create a collage of "beautiful sentences" from art theory, literature, music, the internet, etc., and to to play with those sentences while thinking more about the question. 

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Antony Gromley’s sculptures at the ruins of Delos seem to gaze outward. And in doing so, notes Rachel Spence, “…our eyes turn inward.” Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse also speaks of gazing outward and being transformed by the act: “Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke… Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at - that light, for instance.” 

Becoming. 

Becoming.

Becoming.

Becoming the thing she looked at. Does the sublime evoke a similar becoming? Does one become the horizon; the expanse of time and space? Does one lose personality (the minute details of one’s life) to become that vastness? Back at Delos, I imagine a visitor examining one of Gromley’s figures and stepping between the figure and the view of the horizon. The gaze is obstructed, and now the figure gazes at the visitor. Who is looking at whom? Marina Ambramović’s The Artist is Present comes to mind. Looking into Ambramović’s eyes, and being looked at by the artist in return. A mutual gaze. What kind of transformation are we witnessing? “Time went by and the man at the table was no longer weeping. He was leaning in toward the woman. Everything between the man and the woman became microscopic. Levin felt that something was lifting right out of the man and creeping away. … The woman seemed to become enormous, as if she stretched out and touched the walls and stood as tall as all six floors of the atrium.”* 

Transmutation. 
Metamorphosis.

Transformation. 

We are transformed not only by what we look at but also being looked at in return. Do powerful works of art do just that? Do they look back at us? At our inner world that is just as vast?“For there was an entire universe in that room, a miniature cosmology that contained all that is most vast, most distant, most unknowable. It was a shrine, hardly bigger than a body, in praise of all that exists beyond the body: the representation of one man's inner world, even to the slightest detail.” Anais Nin says, “We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are.”** 

Mirror.

Mirror. 

On the wall.

Why do we gaze outward to gaze inward? “I do think that there is a way in which the outer presence, even through memory or imagination, can be brought inward as a sustaining thing.”*** To ask questions to answers we already know? To remember when we forget? Again. And again. And again.

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* Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love  

** Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude

*** John O’Donohue in conversation with Krista Tippett nonbeing.org

looking out/ looking in (part I)

'6 times left', by Antony Gromley. Image: Financial Times

I recently signed up for an online course, Theoretical Thinking and Writing in Art, taught by An Paenhuysen. Each week we have an assignment. For the first assignment I had to read an art review and distill from it a theoretical question. I had to pay attention to the language used and mull over how the writer expresses her thoughts. And then my own thoughts that emerge. Here is what I wrote.

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Article: Antony Gromley’s Haunting Sculptures on the Greek Island of Delos 

Financial Times, June 14, 2019, by Rachel Spence 

Is a work of art an isolated ‘object' to be ‘admired’ in any unspecified space? Or can location transform the work to reveal or heighten its meaning? Or can the work of art and location feed off each other to create a new reality? 

Reading Rachel Spence’s review of Antony Gromley’s show Sight, set in the ruins of Delos (Greece), one cannot help but feel that it is the latter that is true in this instance. Spence draws the reader in right at the start: a solitary figure (Gromley’s sculpture) on the peak of Mount Kynthos looking out at the Aegean sea. Immediately she evokes both a sense of the romantic and the sublime. The contrast between the smallness of the individual and the vastness of the beyond is unmistakable. Spence talks as much about the venue of the exhibition, the ancient ruins of Delos (a Greek island 'steeped in myth’), as Gromley’s work. Contemporary art meets ancient culture to create an otherworldly (or perhaps a more true-to-the-earth?) spectacle. The island’s ‘primal solitude’ mirrors itself in Gromley’s figures. Spence calls the island being an ‘evocative venue’ for Gromley’s ‘timeless vision’. She then goes on to talk about ‘retinal tricks’: Gromley’s figures that sometimes blend and sometimes stand out in the ruins and landscape of Delos. Spence’s imagination takes flight at the sight of these figures in the unlikely setting of an island with rich history. It also alters her perception of time as she considers one of the figures and remarks on Gromley’s ‘gift for temporal sorcery’. 

Spence considers how we view art, interact with it and are transformed by it. Gromley’s figures seem to gaze at the horizon; and in considering this gaze, Spence makes a note about Gromley’s show title, Sight, and how the figures gazing outward “turn our eyes inward.” I imagine a visitor examining one of Gromley’s figures and stepping between the figure and the view of the horizon. The gaze is obstructed, and now the figure gazes at the visitor. Who is looking at whom? The concept of ’darshan’ comes to mind: of seeing and being seen.