Artist’s Statement

tremendous threat due to never ending human greed - land is mindlessly being excoriated by us through agonizing mechanical process. As I too belong to a rural back-ground, the poignant sagas of land acquisition, environmental and migrant crisis and modern-day slavery of tenured labor really affects me. In my own way I have tried to foreground these subjects in my works. I have been constantly encountering the change of natural landscapes of my ancestral village near Kharagpur, Jhargramand of Santiniketan, where I have now spent a decade. I try to explore, the spiritual affinity and relationship between the man and nature through my works. By getting divorced from the nature day by day, we have murdered our own divine and spiritual self. In that sense my works are empathetic reaction towards these issues.
I am currently working with a time-consuming method of creating layer-like formations of a land by pecking at and skinning the paper with a sharp tool, which I identify as the metaphorical violence to-wards the land by human interference to acquire resources for industrial and 'developmental' purposes. The skin of the paper is the symbol of the land to me and the method of picking at it with a sharp tool represents human rapacity. I usually combine this with various techniques — such as an application of water color tints, soft pastels, charcoal or pen and ink. Sometimes I leave the paper untreated and try to create a minimal monochromatic approach.
More recently, in a suite of ongoing works, I am inspired by the diminishing Khoai landscape of Santiniketan to create intimate study using pen & ink along with excoriated paper surface. My art practice is mainly based on the conflict between natural and artificial, man-made environment. The natural environment is under