Shivani Khoshia

Each painting maps a moment of vulnerability, an experience of uncertainty. I try to enter the space of these moments and chart them, knowing that time, memory and imagination distort a true picture. My goal is to mark spreading sensations and shapes of thought that unknown territories bring. The process becomes very exciting when I feel a space in the painting which I do not recognise or cannot recreate. Something that is more than the sum of its parts like an idiom. When we recall memories, we do so in different ways each time and our experience continually plays with both the past and the present. The work tries to freeze this oscillating movement through appropriate gestures. Some areas are more worked upon than others to navigate a range of sensory intensities across the canvas. The temporal is shown across the the surface rather than in consecutive layers in the way time marks itself on the skin in creases and wrinkles. The temperature in the paintings ranges widely and the contrast of colours and dry and wet marks play with the boundary of what is familiar versus what is alien in the human sensorium. I would say that the works are suggestions of an atmosphere of an experience rather than an attempt at a clear representation. In ambiguous terrain, the paintings bring together a well-considered mix of restraint and chance. By inviting uncertainty, the idea of restraint becomes crystallised, and, by exercising restraint, an expanded field of experience with unknown trajectories can unfold.