In an age of digital
advancement and a tech-driven world, human relationship with nature has greatly
altered. From primitive cultures that revered nature as a powerful entity that
humbled humans we have come all the way to a world where we create, control,
and alter nature to suit human needs. We have transitioned in ways that we as a
human race perhaps did not imagine a few hundred years ago.
Urmila’s present body of works in the exhibition titled ‘Closer’ is the artist’s investigation into life from an intimate level. From merely looking at nature and life from a close range, the artist moves further into observing life from a microscopic level. This body of work which had its beginning a little before the pandemic started taking shape during the lockdown time, created an opportunity for Urmila to observe her surroundings at a much closer range. With fewer things in the plane of sight, she began looking intently at life around her. The stillness of lockdown created an opportunity to introspect on life and what constitutes and makes us alive and functioning - an existential angst that generally loomed over a general majority of people. Transitioning from her earlier series of works which only involved close observations, for this series she moves further closer to observing nature and plunges into a journey that goes what is visible to the ordinary eyes into a cellular level. While her works may momentarily resemble microscopic studies of botanical and plasmic material, where these images cease being scientific slides and turn into artworks, lie in Urmila’s artistic oeuvre. Woodcut images are colourful and made with labour-intense techniques drawing our attention to the image as well as the process simultaneously.
Her series of works titled ‘biotic’ looks at a fundamental life structure and its formation. Here Urmila goes all the way deep into peering and enquiring about the complex nature of how life has formed and functioned. She looks at them with amazement and wonders about what seems so uncomplicated from the outside is formed with immense complexity. Each of these images seems to create a world of its own while simultaneously mirroring the world around us. Urmila’s works create a world within these images and hint at the larger life that these infinitesimal forms are part of. There is a spiritual & meditative aspect attached to each of these images. Be it the process that the artist experienced creating this meticulously detailed work or what the viewers can experience in the act of looking, there is a seamless connection between them.
Closer is a way the
artist investigates the connections that various life forms hold. Her concerns
are about the loss of the interconnectedness of life’s forces and the dire
consequences that may arise as a result. Urmila’s works are her attempts at re-establishing
these connections through her artistic works.
- Sandhya A
