Manisha Parekh By Lin Holland

I met Manisha Parekh in 1997 in Kenya. We were invited as participants on an International Artists Workshop where we spent two weeks living and working together. Our knowledge of each other's work has developed over nine years and through an ongoing dialogue we have identified similarities, differences and connections between our practices and cultural contexts.

As one artist writing about the work of another, the occasion has allowed me to ask Manisha some of the questions I ask myself when making work. In a wider context, as a British artist writing about the work of an Indian artist, I am aware of our different cultural and art historical traditions and this issue has formed part of our recent dialogue. We agreed that the most honest and plausible approach would be for me to respond to the work on the 'One to One' basis that our relationship has grown from, with acknowledgement, when felt appropriate, of the wider cultural contexts.

Part of this text is taken from notes made during long-distance telephone conversations conducted over a period of months. These conversations were frequently punctuated by sounds from our respective daily lives - doorbells ringing, horns honking, children calling etc. The geographical distance of our two worlds became bridged by the technology of the telephone, the proximity of a familiar voice held close to one's ear, and recognition of the sounds of ordinary events that form the shared fabric of daily living.

These punctuations from everyday life have been pertinent to the content of our conversations. As a female artist of the postmodern era, Manisha is intent on her practice being enriched by relationships, daily rituals, and enjoyment of the essential routines of living. It is important to her that the work does not exist in isolation from these elements, in fact they are often the fuel of her creative practice, and she pursues a close interface between the two. She states an aspiration that


"whatever is made in the studio should have direct connections with life."

This deceptively simple desire requires tremendous discipline for an abstract artist to achieve. It demands regular and rigorous contact with the making process in order to distil thought and experience into material, mark and form.

Whilst Manisha acknowledges that material object and sensory experience are different entities, her primary aim is to encapsulate experiences, feelings and observations, however fleeting, into an equivalent visual reality, through the use of simple tools and the transmogrification of basic materials.

In order to encapsulate these experiences, Manisha's oeuvre encompasses many disciplines, including: drawing, painting, relief and sculpture. The works are often made of small units which accumulate power and build scale through multiples and repetition of particular elements. The multiples however, are never mechanically made and feel more like time-lapse films, depicting developmental changes from one thought to the next.

Within contemporary art practice, the emergence of repetition as a key visual and cultural concept raises many issues. Associations with labour and endurance, ritual, tradition, embodiment, difference and of course repetition in relation to technology, are all part of current cultural debate. In relation to her own art practice Manisha views her use of the multiple as

"thought documented in different stages, with different nuances explored, sometimes 100 or more, as in "Letters That Fade", mulling over an idea in different ways, in an attempt to capture the feeling".

There is deliberation in her choice of small units for their intimate "hold in the hand" relationship with the body during the making process, followed by the liberation of

"them all go as they become a single work and something new on the wall".
This approach encompasses a double-edged desire to both exercise and relinquish control over the final product, allowing process and material to participate in the development of thought and end product.

Once the small works are released onto the wall, they are often organised into grid structures. The use of this device provides a sense of order and discipline, against which ideas of sameness and difference can be tested through repetition and variation.

Women artists, including Agnes Martin, Eva Hess, Lisa Milroy, Cathy de Moncheux and others, have employed grids in their work. These artists often use the grid in order to alter its regimented structure, introducing irregular elements which change its rigidity, blurring its neatness and subtly disrupting its meaning.

Recent works such as "Longing-Desire" and "Longing-Wish" (183 x 122 cm each) have grown in scale. This has brought a new set of considerations into the studio. Working on this scale requires a different relationship to the body - demanding full arm movement, greater physical contact with the materials as well as distance from the surface in order to evaluate its progress. These larger works "require careful planning and preparation", whereas smaller works allow "spontaneity and fluidity of thought."

The larger works bring additional challenges:

"They can be more physically demanding when the energy is not always there."
They can also become very labour intensive and Manisha feels it is necessary to know the skills before considering the delegation of any task. (The delegation of work within the making of artworks in India is, in my experience, a more common occurrence than in the west. Political and economic circumstances for many artists in India make this available.) Manisha realises this approach raises other issues and relationships that add further dimensions to the process. She acknowledges that additional skills and sensitivities are required to realise large-scale artworks when the work is delegated. She feels it is sometimes impossible to realise all of these, as well as maintaining the presence of the hand in the final product.

Pleasure is taken in the approaches to both large and small-scale works, realising the difference is part of maintaining a freshness and sense of challenge in the studio.

Manisha frequently works by building a surface with many layers of paper, which are cut through, allowing underlying surfaces to emerge. These works have palimpsest qualities, building depth and solidity from vulnerable materials, embodying the thinking of the artist between their layers. The process of empirical learning is carried forward as each layer is applied. Recognition of the basic material is sometimes illusive, as the hand of the artist transforms their visual qualities, taking them away from the ordinary.

The impetus to layer, cover or reveal, is dealt with in a different manner when surfaces are pierced, allowing materials to protrude, growth-like. These 'protruding' works inevitably affiliate themselves visually, if not in terms of content, with works such as "Accession 1" and "Constant" by Eva Hesse, or with the cumulative hanging photographic works of Annette Messager.

Manisha's choice of materials has, for some considerable time, been deliberately non-hierarchical in traditional artistic terms. She chooses paper and ink over canvas and paint; cord and rope over bronze or stone. Her relationship with, and ability to respond to, the qualities of materials are at the heart of her practice. She states

"The choice of materials feels like a journey - each has a character. Time spent working reveals possibilities and processes of understanding. There is a sense of give and take once work begins and the materials start to guide and show you how to use them. It is an open-ended journey. I have used paper for many years and through the repeated use of a familiar material I can trust the process and have faith in the materials. Working over a long period of time with the same materials allows you to get to know them thoroughly, through the body as well as the mind. I enjoy working with the purity of a material, narrowing down the boundaries in order to explore in greater depth. Qualities of fibre, surface, opacity, translucency and so on become revealed over time and with regular handling."

Through our discussions it has occurred to me that Manisha exercises and relinquishes control over the work in more ways than at first seemed apparent. Her ability to enter into this dynamic process demonstrates a willingness to allow the work to change direction according to material qualities, or characteristics of format, and is an integral part of her creative process. Artists frequently thrive on the element of surprise in their own work; indeed it is something, which keeps them engaged with it. But this has to be worked at in order to arrive at something unexpected. The deliberate merging of interior thoughts with exterior stimuli is a strategy many artists employ to achieve this. Manisha feels

"There has to be both elements present to be creatively alive. There are so many layers involved whilst thinking and making: - family, environment, the space we live in, country, culture, and global concerns. I don't view myself as an overtly political artist dealing with issues but feel it is best if one can begin from ones own self and let things grow from there. I feel that all the negatives within the world are also present within each of us. I don't have the means to change the world but if I can keep myself positive and contribute by beginning with myself, this is my attempt. I accept that this is perhaps a utopian or romantic view, but it's the way I can begin. In the studio I sometimes listen to music or feel stimulated by visual dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Although I am a complete urban product, allusions to nature have been present in the work for some time. There are associations with under-water or out in space, things under the soil germinating. I am continually impressed by how nature has its own way of changing things."

The cyclical germination of growing forms is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for Manisha's practice. There is continuity, coupled with evolution. A tremendous amount of work happens below the surface (unseen) and time is an essential ingredient in order to reap the full rewards of her labours. Her practice could be regarded as having parallels with a botanist, as somebody who studies, annotates and collects specimens in order to understand specifics, difference and subtleties of species. She watches her artworks emerge in both objective and subjective frames of mind.

The new work made for this London show forms a logical part of the evolutionary process of Manisha's practice. There are clear ties to earlier works, but new possibilities and steps of sequential change have been taken in works such as "Beings 1 to 5", where linear sculptural forms with applied acrylic paint and Chinese ink, take the work fully into three dimensions.

The arrangement of the units within these works can be changeable and, dependent upon their relationships with each other, and their location within the gallery space, can take on widely different readings. These objects directly raise issues of installation and relationship with site and viewer in a way that two-dimensional works do not.

The sequence of paintings titled 'Dream' is composed of sculptural/skeletal forms, overlaid with shapes alluding to linear and cellular structures. These forms frequently overlap, inter-twine, wrap, or enclose each other creating in the viewer a sense of corporeal elements engaged in complex and carefully balanced relationships. The use of colour within this sequence imbues the work with a decorative richness, which counterbalances the austere skeletal qualities. All the forms and colours of the "Dream" sequence hang within a background of implied infinity.

Works such as "Wings 1, 2 and 3" have playful anthropomorphic qualities, whilst other works, such as "Longing-Desire" and "Longing-Wish" appear more meditative in temperament, implying a sense of displacement, loss or absence. The works titled "Split" create feelings of an 'other' space, one which is veiled from the surface of the work, creating associations with paintings such as Barnett Newman's 'Onement I" or earlier works by Clyfford Still.

In writing about an artist's work, a question the author must ask is 'what is the purpose of the text?' In the process of writing about Manisha Parekh's work I have concluded that the purpose of this text is to create a sense of the work's origins and the artist's intentions. In doing this, it is openly acknowledged that to write of an Indian artist's work from a western perspective locates the text in a potentially problematic position. Hence the chosen title of the writing "One to One", indicating that the boundaries for the essay have been set as one artist based in Liverpool, responding to the work of another artist based in New Delhi.

Given the fact that Manisha is a visual artist, one assumption could be that the work's ultimate goal is to communicate without recourse to verbal language. The traditional requirement to write about visual art, therefore, can create something of a conundrum for a visual artist. However, this has been a process involving focussed dialogue with Manisha which has brought rewards in the provision of time and opportunity to discuss, reflect, absorb and consider her work, with its subtle inflections, humour and sensitivity. There is a quiet insistence about Manisha's work that is serious, playful, sensitive and forceful in equal measure.

- LIN HOLLAND, Artist/Lecturer, Liverpool, July 2006