Nori, along with Indu Antony, Krishanu Chatterjee and Vivek Muthuramalingam has been working on this hands-on project through the lockdown.
Bengaluru :
Feeling that she has forgotten her mother’s fragrance and the touch of her cool hands, photoartist Aparna Nori has made a diptych, a memory of her mother’s favourite bloom, the rajnigandha (tuberose).
“I wanted my work to have a multi-sensorial experience,” she says about her work titled ‘Memory is My Sixth Sense’. It has been made using the salt technique, a process dating back to the 1800s.
Nori, along with Indu Antony, Krishanu Chatterjee and Vivek Muthuramalingam has been working on this hands-on project through the lockdown. The collective is now exhibiting their works, ‘Being in a State of Salax’, at Kanike, their studio, which is complete with a dark room set up, on appointment basis.
Quite tired of looking at the digital screen, this long-drawn out process has been meditative, says Antony. Feeling a sense of resonance with abandoned photographs, she says, “I have been collecting images, especially of women, from various places. Salt prints have an ephemeral quality to them, they fade, they disappear in front of your eyes – like the abandoned people.” She wanted to preserve them or their existence by stitching the edges of the photograph with her hair which eventually will be the only part of this work that will remain and the empty space to question our existence.
“Each of us has expressed ourselves in different ways without restricting ourselves. From photographs to drawings, our visual language has been varied,” Antony says. During the lockdown, Muthuramalingam woke up every morning to the calls of the visiting birds in his mother’s garden, that made him reminisce about his birding days.
“I took to drawing and rendered the birds that remained in my memory, an exercise that offered me considerable solace,” says Muthuramalingam, who as a part of his photographic documentation of the projects of Biome Environmental Solutions (a Bengaluru-based design firm with a focus on architecture, ecology and water), has created a series of salt prints for their forthcoming book.
“Much like Biome’s architectural creations, each of which is made considering a unique set of challenges – local materials, location, weather and client aspirations – the making of the salt prints considers a variety of parameters too. Quite often the prints don’t necessarily turn out the way it was envisioned, yet yield a different, but surprisingly good result,” he says.
With the digital world having broken barriers, they will do a virtual walk through of the show at the end of the week. Next up is a salt print workshop to teach the technique, scheduled in the next two weeks.
‘Being in a State of Salax’ is on until Sept. 25, at Kanike, Cooke Town, between 11am and 6pm.
Know How
The salted paper technique was created in the mid-1830s by English scientist and inventor Henry Fox Talbot. Acid-free paper is coated with salt and silver nitrate, which makes the paper photo sensitive. A negative is then imprinted through contact print. It involves multiple levels of washing, seven to be precise and no two prints look the same. The toning of prints being exhibited has been done with gold chloride.
Visits by appointment. E-mail: kanikestudios@gmail.com
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Bengaluru / by Vidya Iyengar / Express News Service / September 21st, 2020