Shivangi Ladha

What is our relationship with space?

My body plays an important role in perceiving the space around me. The body and the space supplement and define each other. I confront the city or space with my body. My legs measure the length, my hands touch the objects, my gaze wander around the space, my body feels the temperature, my nose smells the surrounding and ear listen to the sounds. For my own understanding of space I have categorized it into as ‘outer space’ and ‘inner space.’ Inner space can be perceived. When one closes ones eyes, we experience the subjective, collective space of the body; it is objectless, it is dimensionless, it is boundless, deep and endless. In meditation one is neither positive nor negative; one tries to reach the non-duality and a moment when one experience nothingness, a complete silence. Then there is no disconnection of nothingness with space; there is a unity, you are zero, one, infinite at that time. This space for me is a real-space, where body and mind are suspended together and you don’t exist. Here by ‘you’ I mean self, identity, ego.

In this process, time becomes an edge to reach that state of no - mindness and repetition becomes an essential tool to achieve this. Repetition is connected with meditation: I repeat the same task again and again. Sit everyday in a same position to meditate, repeat the same process in trying to reach that state of nothingness as ‘space’. Repetition becomes a kind of force which seems to transcend and take us to an another dimension. As David Hume proposed: ‘ Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it.’

I am exploring  these relationships through my work. Paper – a two-dimensional  surface – becomes a space and bodies are drawn on it. What is the relationship of the bodies to the surface or space? How can the repetitions of marks through print help me to transform a form into formlessness and a state of thought into purposeful thoughtlessness?

My action is conscious but not pre-planned. One can sense a kind of spontaneity in my works. I mostly use drawing and print in my art. My intention is to challenge the conventions of drawing.  Importantly, the drawings are repeated through the action of screen printing across a surface. This creates a tension between the hand drawn and mechanically re-produced states of experiencing the image