I was living at my home in Chennai, India during the pandemic after a gap of six years. I was observing and sketching my place in our family home. However, I was also sketching a lot in the streets especially the traffic junctions, tea shops and fruit & flower markets in the evenings. On large sheets of paper, I have been making repeated marks and erasures using Charcoal and pastels to depict and think about the restful scenes from my home and the contrasting busy streets outside of it. I have been placing different large drawings next to each other giving them an imposing presence. This body of work is born with a background of only spending vacations at my hometown while I was away in a different geography and linguistic region in india with a contrasting socio-political ethos (fascist politics). I am interested and curios to understand my own place with this new experience, knowledge and time. I am trying to look at it from a new perspective, trying to understand it’s socio-political present and the possible future. As I am living in northern California the past six months, I find myself drawing places from back home along with the places from here, where I am finding both similarities and great differences. Depicting signages and using writing contextualizes the images talking about these two places.
