Sarika Bajaj’s solo exhibition draws attention to the exigencies of climate change and the possibility of envisaging new ways of being. Her project is both, an elegy for the fractured world we live in and a portal for a holistic response to the current threat. Her sensorial and tactile multi-media art works, which build upon the symbolism of bird feathers, are entry points to a syncretic world. The utilisation of feathers, meticulous acts of knotting and weaving, and their aggregation within an organic and amorphous whole create meanings that are, at once, patently readable and esoteric.

Cyclical patterns of existence and the resilience of the natural world are strongly articulated within Bajaj’s art practice, both conceptually and formally. Her process comprises gathering, preparing, segregating, cutting, and tying to highlight the meditative aspect of her practice. Having developed an intuitive aesthetic, she has delved into narrativizing it in different forms, including performative acts.

In her tapestries, the bird quill sections appear partially camouflaged within the rhythmic structure of the panels, interwoven within a composite of membranes and threads. The artist generates a natural geometry with the materials, contrasting the brilliance of the coloured threads with the muted tones of the quills and jute fibre. It is as though she finds her truth in the continuous or knotted line of thread or the feather that is ingrained with the DNA of the first beasts that roamed the earth.

Symbolising the interconnectedness of everything, her meditative constructions of organic materials reinterpret notions of the microcosm and the macrocosm and the understanding of time and timelessness, often experienced from the standpoint of something as rhythmic as breathing or moving. The topographies of texture converge and diverge to reveal multiple entry and exit points into spaces where one might search for meaning, in a world of maya or illusion. Each work is embedded with multiple layers of memory, time, and presence through the object’s materiality and the artist’s navigation of it.

Much like a shaman, she shapes form; she recognises and makes visible mathematical order in chaos to offer free-flowing possibilities. As the indigenous Sami tribe believes, all of time and all our ancestors are flowing within us, and one needs to go inward to know and to heal. Bajaj experiences the body as a portal to understanding primordial truths—a bridge between past and future, earth and multiverse.

Lina Vincent