Artist, Nilima Sheikh: To bear witness, learn, and make aware are part of the rights and duties of being an artist.
My name is Nilima Sheikh, and you are in an exhibition titled Fractured Skies.
When I was young, making art was not a profession that you could earn your living by. So I decided to equip myself with a university degree in history. But all along, I never gave up my plan of studying to be a painter afterwards.
My education gave me quite a lot of understanding of the various kinds of art forms that have been practiced all over the world. So the inspiration comes from a love of the world and of different kinds of artmaking.
For instance, many years ago, while wandering around the Crafts Museum in Delhi, I came across this craft practice called Sanjhi: cutting stencil patterns and images that were then used to embellish temple interiors. They have since played a large role in structuring sequences in my painting, enriching surface, and introducing motifs that would complement or play games with my own drawing.
So many of the wonderful paintings from the past were included in manuscripts. I have chosen the format of a scroll in many of the works selected for this exhibition because it has a potential of being seen and read from both sides and giving you enough space to tell of things happening in different places at different times.
In the paintings in this exhibition, there are multiple narratives in conjunction with each other. I do not perceive the world around me from a fixed viewpoint. And in that way, the viewing of the paintings also need active participation from the viewer. In my paintings, there is some reading to do, there is some looking to do, there is some going back and coming forward. The meaning of the work emerges from that dual viewing.