In her ongoing solo, The Geometry of Ash, at Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road, artist Anju Dodiya evokes a post-apocalyptic landscape—one featuring fragments and residue in the aftermath of loss and destruction. But there are also gestures of hope in the form of women reading or relishing a moment of respite before a traumatic event. In the work, The Geometry of Ash, from which the show takes its title, the viewer can see a woman pointing at something, and beneath her hand is a square outlined with charcoal. It looks like a portal of escape. On view till 26 December, Dodiya’s large fabric-on-board works, with compartments or rooms, make use of interconnected narratives to create fractured landscapes of loss and renewal. The use of charcoal with watercolour lends an ashlike hue to the works. The Geometry of Ash also features smaller works on paper, which Dodiya calls “peripheral drawings”. In an interview with Lounge, the artist discusses creating a non-linear narrative, dividing the pictorial space up and the symbolic use of trees in the paintings. Edited excerpts:
Could you elaborate on the process of creating this world of contrasts?
In the work The Geometry of Ash, the portal started as an image that was going to be a labyrinth. When you remove the inner courtyards of the labyrinth, it becomes a portal. At the same time, because of the black paint, the work looks like ash.While making this body of work, I was thinking about the absurdity of life. We talk about loving trees. To fight deforestation, you plant little pots in your garden. You do little gestures, which are very human and seem perfect. But the absurdity is that olive trees, which are more than thousands of years old, have been wiped out in Gaza. That’s the sort of imbalance in the lives we lead. We can’t stop making useful gestures. You’re constantly under threat, but you can’t possibly give up.
There are a lot of trees in the show. For instance, in ‘Log Women’, you show women holding trees in a protective gesture.
In this particular work, the log is the memory of a tree, it is about ancestors. In a symbolic way, it is a source of friendship and comfort…. (In other works) those chopped off logs could be heads. Different meanings can be ascribed to a single image. For the past four-five years, I’ve been using trees a lot in my paintings. When I say trees, only one painting has leaves. Otherwise, it’s all about branches, which visually are solid lines. Those solid lines could be routes. There are folklores about being tied to a tree or ghosts living in trees. If you look at Italian artist Giotto di Bondone’s The Entry into Jerusalem, in which Christ is being taken for the crucifixion, there are boys perched on trees looking down at this significant event. Then there is a famous picture by Henri Cartier-Bresson of grieving mourners climbing on trees after Mahatma Gandhi died. Trees have always been witnesses to human history.
How important is layering of images to you? In your works, fiction, fact and fantasy collide.
(The images are) conscious, fictional constructs. The larger scale has allowed me to make those divisions like different geographies—like they are different characters in different spaces, or there’s a suggestion of different rooms. In the painting called Paper Storm, on one side there is an idyllic landscape and on the other side you see desperation with paper flying around. A sort of irony is going on. In The Geometry of Ash, a female figure is pointing at something. She came to me from a Pompeii fresco that I had seen, in which she was carrying a musical instrument. In the next panel, you see this heap of bodies and bare trees. At the bottom panel is an arrow with ribbons around it like the ones denoting wind directions. Also, there’s a sly suggestion as the arrow is going from west to east. A pattern, which is like an African print, also hints at the history of colonialism, much like the arrow.
There are references from literature and cinema. While ‘Twins’ refers to a scene in David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’, ‘The Arc of a Branch’ features a man and a woman on the verge of kissing, evoking old Hollywood romance.
I take from a lot of sources and strike another sort of narrative. As an artist it really interests me how we deal with ideas and connect images. I am extremely greedy about images. When I am watching a film, and if I see a certain sort of bed or a lamp or a gesture, I might take a screenshot. When I am looking at a fashion magazine and I see a strange, tall collar, which could be difficult for the wearer, I might tear out a page and keep it. And, of course, great art, which I have been carefully looking at from the beginning. When I was in art school, I loved Robert Rauschenberg. I continue to feel inspired, looking at the way he worked with material and juxtaposed diverse images and objects. The first time I saw Giotto’s frescoes in Padua (Italy), I was so moved and realised that it’s possible to feel so much when you look at a painting. These inspirations grow inside you and turn up at the most crucial moments.
How do these direct-indirect influences manifest in your work?
I seem to have an eye for gestures and collect them. I might paint a cluster of heads looking in one direction and then realise that it evokes the feeling of how some mourners are depicted in The Death of the Virgin by Giotto. In the present show, in The Green Book, there is this woman reading with her legs up in the air. That came from an image from Vogue, in which I’d seen a model lounging on a chair with her legs up in the air. In my painting, there’s a big book covering her crotch. It is like the body is reading the book but not the woman. The gesture is from an image but in my work I have tried to create a psychological possibility there. I might start with a form, but then it enters areas of disquiet.
How important is reading to your process? Because there are several images of reading in this show.
To me, books are motifs of civilisation. I worry about the burning of books and the end of libraries. Personally, I don’t read as much as I should, but I do read a lot of fiction. The last book I finished was Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. While I was reading it, I was doing these panel paintings with compartments, and I thought, “I could find a connection between the technique of the book and my work.” The book is told in fragments and it explores different realities and subjects simultaneously. She talks about taxidermy, preserving bodies, and then goes on to discuss stagnant houses and disgruntled housewives. Her juxtapositions are interesting—you expect something, then you go on another trail and it gives you something else.
Shweta Upadhyay is an arts journalist and co-author of I’ll be Looking at the Moon but I’ll be Seeing You.