The colours of our homes

 Nepal: Our homes are us. They portray who we are. And in many ways, our homes are our memories, feelings, longings, people, and perhaps, they are even literally our tangible imprints on earth—a visible root of our becoming and our first step to entering society.

It is where we become personal and allow ourselves to be creative and imaginative.

At the Wind Horse Gallery’s ‘Poems from Home’ exhibition, these ideas and memories of our homes become the premise to understand the artworks of five emerging women artists: Laxmi Tamang, Nawina Sunuwar, Pooja Duwal, Sara Tunich Koinch, and Sumana Shakya. The exhibition features 49 artworks, all curated by artist Bharat Rai for an art interaction project of art graduates from two prominent art universities.

The works of the young artists are poetic and have their own metaphors, imageries, and expressions as implied in the title of the exhibition, ‘Poems from Home.’ Their art poems stir our emotions and ask us to connect and discover meaning in our experiences.

Sumana Shakya’s embroidery on fabric series, ‘Subtle Transition’, pays attention to the tangible memories that often go unnoticed in making a home. Her works release us to wander into our memories of home, particularly the shapes, patterns, elements, and stains that make our house a home.

Her minimal but important artwork, ‘Held’, shows a part of her house’s wall with diagonal threaded strokes. The engraved stains divide the work into two halves. The patterns attempt to depict the imprints of her family's hands that have stroked past the wall over the years without their notice. Shakya effectively shows how elements of our homes have quietly witnessed the ins and outs of our lives.

Telephone dial pad smudged with fingerprints, the J pattern created every time doorknobs are opened, marks of dampness on walls are some of the beautiful details she uses in her series.

Like Shakya, Laxmi Tamang’s watercolour series, ‘In Between’, also plays with minimal details. And as Tamang’s own stylistic trait goes, she uses strands of hair to highlight and bring things together in her artworks to show mundane things that take up their own space and allude to unheeded stories from her own dwellings. An unused scrunchie that still has a few strands of the owner's hair, an insect that dwells on a section of the house’s wall and has a life of its own, a sack full of twigs and woods, noises of utensils clanging against each other in the kitchen, a foot wearing a slipper that has been sewed multiple times are some of the details Tamang deploys to urge viewers to see her narrative. She uses real hair in the paintings to try and compare the existence of things with the characteristics of hair—its resilience, strength, significance, and how it conceals things.

Throughout the viewing of works, the exhibition benefits from an unintentional congruence of the five artists' ideas, and this is perhaps because all are of similar age and stage in life.

Pooja Duwal’s oil series, ‘There are spaces in between’, explores another dimension of homes, relationships and their imprints, and people’s possessions—some curated and others lying and hanging on walls. By shifting away from the facade of house structures, Duwal, in her second exhibition with the Wind Horse Gallery, chooses to focus on her sister’s presence in her artworks. Duwal puts together candid moments of how she has known her sister. There are notebooks and paintbrushes lying on tables; towels, sweaters, and bags hanging on a wall hanger; her sister mindlessly using her phone; in one she is looking at someone while working in their kitchen, and in another, she is sitting at her home desk lost in her world.

These are familiar images we know and have seen in our houses, and so, with Duwal’s work, it's easy to replace the subject in the picture with our own family members and objects.

In another series, ‘Memories written in the lines’, Nawina Sunuwar also focuses on a person to talk about homes and offers the idea of how it's not always the physical structures but people who make us feel at home; for her, it’s her boju (grandma). Sunuwar brings her personal story of how she found a home in her ancestral home through her boju. Her woodwork-relief prints work like illusions with minute but infinite strokes in her pieces. They show detailed and zoomed-in graceful lines of her boju’s life, mannerisms, and reveal apparel and pieces of jewellery she identifies with.

Sunuwar’s black and white prints unveil the house and fields, two essential elements around which her boju’s life revolves. Her work is profound and beautifully expresses the haziness and complexity of her memory and idea of home. The viewers can feel that she is still trying to get a hold of these memories. And in a way, her series also tells tales of migrated families who often never find their way back home because of life’s uncertain turns.

Her series is similar to Duwal’s, but is more mystifying. And it is also a show-stealer as it urges viewers to look deeper to unravel the artwork's hidden images. One quick trick to dissect her works is to take a photo of the artworks to look within the prints to discover the hidden faces and patterns.

Another remarkable series in the exhibition is Sara Tunich Koinch’s ‘Prominent Patterns’. Koinch uses recharge cards as backdrops in her artworks, and by doing so, she tells how the advancement in telecommunication technologies has served as a bridge to connect with our loved ones and the world around us. Her series is also one of the largest collections among the five artists.

In her art pieces, Koinch works with recharge cards and skillfully blends the hues of her acrylic colours to draw people’s attention to her works. In addition to that, she also brings stories of people from diverse walks of life in the frames. Whether for talking to people or making memories and sharing them with people, our phones have become an extended part of our life experiences, and Koinch’s artworks make that aspect unmistakably prominent.

What’s beautiful about ‘Poems from Home’ is that the works are not trying to be great and perfect. They are expressions the five artists connect to the most at this point in their lives. The artists look for traces of memories in their homes; they connect the dots and make an attempt to comprehend life.

And they don’t shy away from detailing the idea behind their works in their art statements, making the viewers more interested in understanding their works and bringing their own meaning to them.

But oddly, their search for a home, connection and the meaning behind the existence of things also reflect the solitary journey they have had during this pandemic era. The pandemic and the many lockdowns have resulted in so much chaos and made many of us look inwards. After all, it is when we are alone we tend to think about life’s deeper meanings and try to put them together in words and images. ‘Poems from Home’ feels the same; the ideas are scattered, unresolved and obscure, but they feel like emotions we have known.

The gallery’s effort, however, with the curation is less felt. Had the emotions in the artworks not resonated with our own, we would have questioned the curatorial design and presentation. I think the gallery and the curatorial team’s responsibility is to bring life to artworks and create a viewing experience that effortlessly connects viewers to the artists’ ideas.

Still, ‘Poems from Home’ manages to invoke our thoughts. It leaves us to think about the homes we have made and the ideas and imagination we have attempted to shape and build. In the ongoing fanfare of art in the month of the largest exhibition of contemporary arts in Nepal ‘Kathmandu Triennale 2077’, this collateral exhibition is a place worth visiting.