The intimacy of a vulnerable body expands into an immersive, all-encompassing register; fragile layers of skin shed into the vast expanses of earthy landscape — are we encountering the aftermath of a violent death, or perhaps, a scorched beginning, the split birth of a human self? At the very onset, temporality and narrative turn murky, recursive, circulatory, and if you look closely, even primordial. For her first solo exhibition at Project 88, Trupti Patel conjures an eco-feminist imaginary: two majestic, cascading female bodies move from the ground, reclaiming the earth, charged with the historicity of millennia. But on another edge, an ashen torso is frozen on a threshold, as she turns away, haunting the space with the possibility of a return, a recoil, a relapse. Time must be grasped through material echoes, through ancestral residues: soil, clay, ash, sediment, stone. Figure and ground — body and landscape — are no longer isolated entities, but immanently entrenched, entangled; and it is in their friction that we might fathom newer modes of resilience in our deeply hegemonic world.
Trupti's approach to sculpture is symbolic and precise: each grain of soil is foraged from landscapes in turmoil, exhuming the porous — and political — borders cut by human hand. But the material in itself does not translate into a resolved signifier, rather, it holds a stubborn enigma. Since the 1970s, the artist has relentlessly pursued this singular endeavour: grasping at “finite traces of infinite proportions”, contained inside the materiality of our blood-soaked earth. How do we reckon with the otherness of scorched soil that also bears life? A series of smaller, tender corporeal sculptures are arranged in ‘still life’ formations, hinting toward larger art historical trajectories.
We do not witness a romanticised or imagined ‘unity’, but rather, the tenuous textures of difference that determine cultural and social belonging. Trupti’s monumental figures are set against the backdrop of intricate terracruda paper relief drawings, which take on sculptural realms. Out here, the artist layers specific pigments on sliced paper, each sourced from a distinct political state of India. The drawings comprise 29 layers of soil, as the work was created back in 2017, when the bifurcation of Jammu & Kashmir into two union territories (and their subsequent erasure) was yet to arrive. Each layer of paper builds into a floating, oneiric figure cast in gold, which appears light, porous, and dream-like despite its archival weight.
Although Trupti’s work has been shown extensively across the globe, this exhibition marks a rare survey of the artist’s practice in India, with a new body of large scale sculptures, furthering her laborious research into the eco-poetics of terracruda, soil and ash. Each sculpture began as a horizontal slab of clay, which the artist gently folds, layer by layer, into corporeal form, building a mould. In turn, her earthy moulds shed their soil to enter a fiber body, then cast into white resin, and are inevitably painted with the ashen patinas of their former selves. The earth transforms into ash, only to return into traces of its former, fertile self — a beginning forged by its own shadow.
