An artist in progress

Scattered on an elevated platform at the centre of Dubai’s Ishara Art Foundation are huge droplets of water, at least that is what it seems. Each roughly the size of a pumpkin. Walk a little closer, and you realise that unlike water, they are stiff and stagnant. Only when you read the complementing text that you learn it is glass. Artist Ayesha Sultana has called the piece Pools. “It can be pools of anything,” she says. “Blood, water, bodily fluids.”

Sultana is an artist in progress. She continues to figure out her own work long after its completion. It is the ambiguity of an art work and the process behind it that captures her imagination. She doesn’t have a set destination in mind before embarking on the journey. For Pools, the Georgia-based artist worked with a master glass-blower, learning the technique to control her breath to achieve the desired shape.

“I tried out different forms, different shapes, but somehow this kind of oval form was stuck in my mind. I still haven’t processed it fully, thoroughly. I think it takes me some time, some distance to kind of reflect and introspect. It’s still new for me because I made this work only three months ago,” she says, adding, “I can talk about the process a little bit, but I still don’t fully understand why I made it, and I don’t want to just make things up to sound intelligent. That’s why, may be, I keep revisiting my works.” Pools, in a way, recalls Sultana’s Breath Count series, which “reveals patterns that represent a delicate inward probe using time, rhythm and removal in breath”. She began the series, also exhibited here, in 2018, and will be wrapping it up this year.

Sultana’s reluctance to categorically define the purpose of an art work is reflective of the way the exhibition came together. The show features a range of artworks she created over the years, which have all been put together under the title of Fragility and Resilience by curator Sabih Ahmed. The official note on the show describes it as “an exploration of the delicate balance between the vulnerability and strength of our planet today”. But she says, “I’m not sure if thinking about the environment was intentional when I was making the works for this exhibition. May be on a subconscious level it was there.”

May be it was. Sample the pieces she has created over the years: The Breath Count series uses paper as the primary medium, with a coating of clay on it. Miasms uses ink on tissue paper. The Blue of Distance, a suite of 28 pieces, is watercolour on paper.

“When I read on climate change, air pollution or different kinds of environmental destruction, whether it’s from wars or industrial pollution, it does bother me, and I think on some level it has influenced me to use paper,” she says.

Sultana adds, “I like materials that undergo a process of degradation. When I started making my graphite drawing series, it was important for me that the work was left without any frame or glass. I thought about how in over 50 years or 100 years, the work may completely break down, and I think that’s okay. It’s interesting for me to at the life of an artwork like the cycle of life.”

If Pools was about taking control, the Inhabiting Our Bodies series, which she created for the show, is about letting go. She uses different coloured inks on Japanese silk tissue, and lets the material have a course of its own. The result is a series of multi-hued organic shapes. Sultana elaborates, “When I would show the pieces to the curator, he would encourage me to go through my experiments and see where it goes. I now like to think of them as organs.”

For those familiar with Sultana’s works, showcased across India and abroad by Kolkata-based gallery Experimenter, they will know that her practice has been dominated by a monochromatic palette. She has, in fact, become synonymous with her graphite drawings, an achievement that all artists strive for. But Sultana’s approach towards recognisability, much like her art, is alternative.

“Among all the works I’ve made in the last 15 years, the graphite pieces stand out, also because it’s been shown the most. It’s a good thing, but at the same time, if it’s the only body of work that people associate me with, it becomes a little problematic. With this particular exhibition, I explored with a wider range of ideas and mediums. It was sort of freeing.”