Siri Devi
Siri Devi
The mirrors are in Rorschach-like inkblot patterns. They are placed upon what has become a recurring motif in my practice - Padmapeeta, the lotus pedestal that is a common base for idols of worship in Indian iconography. I see this sculptural element as an iconographical tool to place or frame deified objects that are symbols of the absolute.
If our subconscious mind is in possession of innumerable thoughts that float upon it, with an occasional image that makes its way upon the surface… then how we process that image or thought possibly dictates our perception of the world. I would like to think of this as mind mining. This mind mining along with the images or thoughts that the viewer then sees in the patterns as well as the reflections that change according to its situation, will become part of this work.
Truth or Reality is an ever changing, unfolding process, it cannot be grasped or held… can only be glimpsed. I am interested in mirrors not only as a medium, but also as a material and an object with metaphysical connotations, it to me at times is “Maya” – the great illusion of existence, occasionally opening up moments of indescribable realisations of “Truth”.
Each moment contains all of eternity, it is this moment that gets reflected in the artwork. That what is reflected at a moment in time for the person looking at it... is what I would think of as the “individual truth”, a combination of thought, perception and a moment. This becomes deified by placing it on the Padmapeeta.
Though I have had above and many other thoughts about this work during the journey that led up to this form, it is also made by the viewer. The mirror inkblots are a visual exposition of an otherwise cerebral, open-ended unconscious thought process. What the viewer can hope to unearth is the depth of their own subjectivity, much in the way the French theorist Roland Barthes spoke of in his 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author,” in which he says that “the essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the ‘passions’ or ‘tastes’ of the writer. A text’s unity lies not in its origins or its creator, but in its destination or its audience.”
Every work is "eternally made here and now".
