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THE TIMES OF INDIA, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1986

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Sunday Review

A metaphor in full bloom

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"AGNI": By Zarina Hashmi.

There is a mantle of softness on her creations that the medium receives and supports naturally. Reality and its corners have been recessed, rounded into a philosophy of assimilation.

by Lakshmi Lal

ON show, last month, at Art Heritage, New Delhi and coming to Cymroza Art Gallery, Bombay, from February 3 to February 18, is Zarina Hashmi's work, on and with paper, spread over a period of 12 years. For those of us who look upon paper as something used for superimposition - either printing or drawing or painting - the exhibition is a revelation. For, apart from etching, printing, embossing, she casts paper into low-relief sculpture, works thread into it and, in one intriguing series, pinpricks it into unique designs of feeling and response.
I first saw Zarina's works in 1981 when I met her in New York. She was doing cast paper then which has been, apart from printing, her main preoccupation. She pulps and processes her raw material in a machine she has set up in her studio and, designing her own moulds, she casts her works. They are evocations - of her search for shelter, of her response to the throbbing city she lives in, of her links with humanity housed in niches carved out in space and time, stacked in rows skyhigh, pigeon-holed or heaped in giant blossom shapes, a many-petalled fantasy; or yet again, a simple conical tent, plear, fold and peak flattened out in a bird's eye-view ("Twisted House").
Colour, with Zarina, is something that seems to infuse and soak through almost at the very inception and birth of a piece. And her palette ventures tentatively into a limited play of hues - graphite grey, sandstone pink, golden ochre. It is a distinctly mineral range and fills the eye as it suffuses the heart with its earthy richness. There is a mantle of softness, too, on her creations that the medium receives and supports quite naturally. Reality and its corners have been recessed, rounded into a philosophy of acceptance, assimilation, reminiscence. The abstraction is traceable to an identifiable form as if, in transmutation, it is reluctant to snap its links, burn its boats.
Her prints and etchings are extensions of her paper sculpture. "Agni" is a blossom of fire where the flame petals speak a primal language. There is a leaping, licking movement that she holds in place, contains, through art and artifice. The first flowers, and the delicate flecks of gold playing hide-and-seek among the bold brush strokes - sooty, blackened, smudged - convey the molten gold and crackle of a blaze; its warmth, its life-giving power. There is a ritual rare-faction that seems to contain within it a live, barbaric core, transformed by myth, religion and civilization - cave-man, Prometheus, Zoroastrian, Hindu. It is a metaphor in full bloom, touched to life by the rays of an artist's imagination. I would mention here Zarina's response to the November '84 riots, the conflagration that was Trilokpuri, a restrained but heartfelt gesture, standing beyond polemics, outside praise or blame, a pronouncement on "man's inhumanity to man," a recurring, mysterious, ugly fact of life.
And now to Zarina's silken tread through white fields of paper. Thread and knot, side by side with sparse embossing, take one back to handicrafting and bygone days when women pattered their lives through weaving, sewing and embroidery, "Working with the hand has always been of great significance to me. I need to feel and touch, to knot and pull." There is a quiet, strong delicacy in this threadwork series, silken yet binding; a subtle play of texture that speaks of family and bondage and early homesteads.

White Lunacy

The most intriguing paper creations in this exhibition are her (again) white set of pinpricked papers. In them, Zarina patterns minutely, meticulously, covering the whole surface. They have the quality of revelation that comes when one stands poised (as we all do at times) on the edges of white lunacy. I mentioned that they reminded me of anthills, the grained, buildup over weeks that one used to disturb as a child, bringing out crowds of hurrying creatures, frantic in their scurrying. I could feel my skin goose-flesh with the memory. "Well, they are based on termites," said Zarina. "It's a strong memory. You go into an old store-room, see a piece of wood that appears perfectly whole and undamaged and pick it up; underneath, out of sight, termites have got at it and it is rotten and crumbling." It was amazing how, without a touch of colour, on flat, dead-white sheets, she had managed, with no tilting, to convey the rot that attacks, spreads and undermines. Yet the ugliness has been managed and shaped into a thing of beauty and thereby, of truth.
I reminded myself of Zarina's involvement with women's causes, the active women's groups she has been associated with in New York, the militancy of her fellow-artists as they fight, inching their way to hard-won successes. She seems to have retained intact her personal fortifications through these assaults of feminist furore, nurturing her talents and her psyche which beyond any doubt, is truly, yet not excessively, feminine. There is a fearless plodding through to her true self, as she holds on to the only truth that counts - a projection of life as she sees it through a distinct language of art as she understands it. It is a simple, direct approach to both art and life which in her case seem to meet and become one.