Wordsworth was right. The poet said, “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
Bengaluru-born Ravikumar Kashi “does many things.” He is an artist who writes on art and visual culture and teaches at an architecture college in the city. Over and above these “three long-standing involvements,” Ravikumar has also been systematically documenting the visual culture of our city — “its flex banners, images on vehicles, like autos and buses, handpainted shop signages, showcases in homes, and more” — across numerous hard drives at his studio, which he likes to call a “lab” because it is the place where he tries out his ideas. “The final work might look like magic, but there’s a history to the process of creating magic,” he points out.
Sgt. Paper
His artistic practice started with painting, moved to printmaking, and now, for nearly two decades, “has largely been around paper… I don’t work on paper; rather, I work with paper,” he says, marking out his distinct approach to this ubiquitous material. Ravikumar mixes and “moulds the pulp in various ways” to transform “the fundamental idea that paper is a white surface on which you do something.”
On being nudged for an origin story of his ongoing fascination with paper, Ravikumar recalls “as a child, repeatedly visiting the live paper-making demonstration unit” — the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum. Quickly, he draws a link to another memory: “making paper in high school after reading about the process in a magazine.” He describes his love for the late sculptor-printmaker Somnath Hore, whose series Wounds he saw at the NGMA in New Delhi in the 1990s. Hore used a pulp-print technique to give his “white-on-white” prints this touchable, sculptural quality. These various encounters with paper as a material and “wondering how I can do this” have “linked up” to shape his practice, he offers up as a possible explanation.
Over the years, his experimentation and engagement with the material have evolved. His earlier paper works were “stronger, sturdier, and looked like I was competing with other materials to say: look, paper is strong, too.” Over the past two-odd years, especially with his latest work — We don’t end at our edges — he has refined and personalised the technique of pulp-painting, or using paper pulp to paint. This has changed his “whole attitude” to working with paper. Now, he works with “the vulnerability of paper: it is very soft, very gentle, and tactile.” He has begun to think of the material of paper as a “breathing membrane, where things can go in and out.”
With this shift in approach to paper, the presentation of Ravikumar’s works has changed, too. “From the sculptural, it has moved into installation,” he says. The present works demand this kind of display design because “they can’t be framed or put in a box because the whole fun will be lost.” Follow his practice here.
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LURU Hangs with... is a monthly Luru Newsletter series which takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists.
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