Introduction

While this conversation has been going on for a long time with many different students, my current second year masters students – nine of them from Information Arts and Information Design Practices and one from Visual Communication, have been gathering together in online meetings, over watsapp chats, phone calls, email letters, building a culture of conversation together, inquiring into our fears, worries, frustrations, and creative processes. We have encountered friends and families getting COVID-19, one of the students also losing a parent to COVID-19. This time together has been tough, fraught with impossible situations, and yet somehow, we have found meaning in being together, leaning on each other as artists, designers, and people.

This exposition explores one of these many exchanges as I unfold my creative process to them. It started with our discussions on emerging form and what form means to an artist and designer, sometime in November 2020. They are all in the middle of working on their graduating projects, each of it has a social or environmental relevance. They have taken up wicked problems, nuanced narratives and complex issues that takes all their energy and intention to unravel. They are impeded by their own fears of their capabilities as much by the COVID 19 scenario, which has initiated lockdown on working with communities and travelling to places. Amidst all this chaos, we find time to ask the most essential question of ourselves, and we ask it together –

What does it take to be human?

In part 2, I document extracts from our chat conversation on watsapp –

I shared a step-by-step process of the evolution of a new painting I was making. This is a two way process of trust, restfulness and need on both our sides – mentor and students. I am coming out of hibernation of the last year where I was writing up my doctoral thesis alongside my full-time work responsibilities. And they are embarking on a new journey. We both share trepidations and inertias, that have different meanings and starting points, but the emotions are somehow the same. I need their trust, conversations and confidence in me to unfold my work to them, and they draw inspiration from my modeling and my openness to sharing my creative life with them.

My doctoral work inquired into ‘porosity’ as a principle of consciousness that allows for a fluid interchange of relationships between the human and natural world. Out of my countless encounters in the natural world, I am drawn by many memories to create a series of paintings. Using water colour and pen and ink, I begin to unravel the memories of my porous moments with the natural world. The first of this is Coucal and Dancing frog at Chingara Waterfalls, Coorg, Karnataka. In the heart of the Western Ghats, this waterfall is located inside the rain forests, with an abundance of wildlife, both flora and fauna.  Four of us- colleagues, friends, ecologists and biologists and myself an artist, walked through sometimes dense, and sometimes lighter forested areas, the raucous call of the hornbills, giant red snails crawling on the side, snakes slipping away, frogs croaking, scarlet minivets lighting up the dense green covers to reach the waterfall.  This painting captures my intense experiences at the waterfall.  In opening this memory and the creative process that followed it, I let my students see my own fears, wonder, mysticism, artistry, mistakes, and vulnerability. Cherished and embraced by them in an online space, I was encouraged to continue the conversations from the 9^th of February to the 19^th of February when I set aside this painting and started others. Our conversation is  ongoing as I write this exposition and I continue to share in a more limited manner, my creative process for newer works I am creating as part of the series.

What are our everyday utopias?

Setting up a culture for our classroom where 

• We can evoke friendship in and through artistic research.
• We are held together by the poetics of our vulnerability.
• We gather in the safety of our invisible embraces and laughter.
• We ponder together about life, earth and being human.
• We rediscover our lost languages, we trace them to the past, we articulate them in the now, and we draw them to the future.

Amidst all that strains us, pulls us apart, everyday issues, administrative needs, educational expectations, examinations, need to start hunting for jobs, taking care of our personal lives, our utopia is creating space and time for the culture of the classroom that we are constantly creating.

Artistic research immersed within questions of education, politics of design and action, the mundaneness of everyday practice, the music I cherish and my playlists that inspire my moods and the relationships that unfold between mentor and students, the journeys of teaching and learning, where our roles are constantly shifting – in this discussion are located around twelve circles of thought, one flowing into the other.

Starting out with - What does form mean to the artist/ designer? We take a plunge into exercises, activities, workshops, conversations, some of it going back to April 2020, others starting out in July 2019 when they started the program. As they work on their projects, I work on mine. In this extended sharing, fluidly and seamless I bring out and integrate the issues and politics of creativity as I have perceived and studied them across the last seventeen odd years of my practice as an educator. In my own vulnerability, quest for identity, language, voice, expression and making – I draw out theirs. This is our story, a shared journey, a walking together of sorts from the different places that we are in. Our minds, beings and consciousness are connected in the subtle ways of the human spirit. We are working on this, these are forgotten ancient practices, but it is possible still, when trust, love and embrace happens, and unconditionally we are connected without our knowledge.  And as one of them spoke for the others – I seem to know how to complete their sentences, and my tribute to them is that, they know to complete mine.

My creative practice is rooted in Indian philosophical and aesthetic traditions. By virtue of this, my practice is reflective, meditative, in Indian words, it is a yoga (A spiritual discipline) and a yajna (Transformative Ritual). It is also an act of crafting consciousness and inner self, of crafting one’s own being.  It is in this light that my conversations unfold with my students, creating new language for a contemporary world, where these ancient cultural intuitions, ways of creative practice and the art of mentoring continue to inform and guide me.