Srishti Institute of Art Design & Technology, Bangalore
Workshop: Deja Vu - Expressions in Wood, 2014
Workshop: Deja Vu - Expressions in Wood, 2014
We were introduced to the process of printmaking using woodcut technique. The assignment was to create original artworks based on observations at MG Road, Bangalore. My compositions try to represent my observations and thoughts with relative excerpts that I had recently read. The series was also later printed as postcards.
We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin.
- Alan Watts
We don’t really know where we begin and end. In space, yes; but in time, no. Who I am is certainly part of how I look and vice versa. I want to know where I begin and end, what size I am, and what suits me… I am not “in” this body, I am this body. Waist or no waist. But all the same, there’s something about me that doesn’t change, hasn’t changed, through all the remarkable, exciting, alarming, and disappointing transformations my body has gone through. There is a person there who isn’t only what she looks like, and to find her and know her I have to look through, look in, look deep. Not only in space, but in time.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
I don’t know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone.
- Alan Lightman
True as it may be that “everything exists at once with its opposite” and that polarities only imprison us, there was something decidedly discomfiting about the situation, yet strangely comforting at the same time: To be human is to be embodied, which implies an inevitable relationship with materiality — and perhaps, if even the enlightened embrace it, that’s okay. Desire is easy. And everywhere.
- Rebecca Solnit
