Symphony

If there is one thing that always mesmerises me about Santiniketan, a place in West Bengal, it is the amount of flowering plants there. With each season, they take turns to adorn the area and in many cases they are present together. They come and they go, they exist for a period of time before they return back to the earth. They are temporary yet their existence is constant. Can these be preserved though? Can they be captured and if so then in what way? Can this quiet existence, though meek and fragile but exuberant at its peak be presented without the grips of time? These were the questions. This stirred in me something that would lead to the installation work of thirty-five plants that I had collected in Santiniketan. It consists of panels in which each panel has paintings of each flower or leaf as it undergoes its change. These changes were shown in rectangular pieces of glass, of about five to eight in number, arranged at right angles to each other on plywood stands. Hence each piece in each panel exists as its own entity, as an event in time, with its own space. However, given the transparency of glass, these entities can be seen overlapping each other as well as with other panel sets as you move around the installation. This brings about the understanding of how all things exist as their own but allow the existence of others, in ways only nature is capable of - Independency yet an interdependence. With these paintings, photographs of the places from where I collected the plants are also kept as part of the installation. Along one line of the installation, I have also included a piece of writing that is given below: Where do we belong? Do we belong within the bark? Running like the vitality That will eventually reach the tips, Bursting with the hope, Of belonging there too? Do we belong in those few seconds? Of free falling, As we feel the force of the wind, the rain and the Sun, Between the sky we reach out to, And the ground that awaits our fall? Are we bound to belong? Where the earth touches us And we live that time, The time of perish? Or is it okay, To slowly seep and break and dissolve, Only to be taken back again, Inside where you think you Belong, And let it go on?