Geeti Sen: Zarina, your involvement with paper and its possibilities spans your entire life, and it defines your creative expression. This exhibition so aptly titled Kaghaz ke Ghar reviews yourimages in cast paper from the 1980s.
Zarina Hasmi: Don’t you think it is a good title? Houses of Paper is a play on word both literally and metaphorically. All the works in this exhibition are made of paper; most of them cast from paper pulp, some cut from printed-paper and others are prints. Paper is fragile, and resilient.
Thematically also, these forms in cast paper address the idea of the house/home, which has engaged me for years. There is an early sculpture from 1980 which I call Spaces to Hide. Another cast paper Twisted House, 1984; several forms focus on structural elements of the house, Wall, Roof, Steps, Corners; then the house extends into the garden with the Seed, Rock, Lotus and Phool (Flower).
GS: Because these images in cast paper are tangible, they substantiate the idea of permanence; yet they retrieve the past and yield to the idea of impermanence. Your etchings again titled House at Aligarh (1990) and House with Four Walls (1991) are defined with lines immutable – but they trace a world that has disappeared. These implicit contradictions of permanence/impermanence make your images unique.
When the Twisted House was exhibited in New York in the show of Women Artists of the ‘80s, New Talent, the catalogue carried an intriguing interpretation: “All this is a glimpse of something outside and bigger than oneself and yet within”.
ZH: My sculptures in cast paper are solid. I like the malleability of paper pulp. The pulp is thick, sometimes hard to mould. When I made the large sculpture Lotus (1982) which is 25 by 30 inches, I constructed the negative mould in plexiglass. Again Steps (1980) is like a step-well, and this mould also was constructed in plexiglass.
But I have never been attracted to using plastic for the finished work. I am drawn to natural mediums such as wood, clay and paper. You can discover a fault here or there, you can find gradations in color. Using paper is like working on clay… paper is like working on your own skin.
GS: There are affinities with your etchings following in the 1990s. Spaces to Hide (1980) corresponds to your etching with the same title. This image anticipates also your etchings titled House at Aligarh of 1990 and House with Four Walls of 1991. In place of lines you have pitted the surface here with triangular perforations, but again you use a grid plan.
By the way, that is an interesting title! Why did you call it Spaces to Hide?
ZH: When I came to New York and was looking for a place to live, I read the signs outside the building: ‘Space to Rent.” This transformed to Spaces to Hide; at that time I was looking for a place to hide, a place of my own. And I have lived in this space since 1976, for thirty years.
GS: That was a significant turning point when you chose to settle down in New York on your own. Your personal history is written into every image.
I find a distinction between your etchings and woodcuts of the 1990s and these earlier works. Your images in cast paper seem to me to be more personal, more sensuous: the Seed, the Lotus, the Shrine use curves, and they vibrate with color. Your etchings are more restrained -- distilling from memory its essence. To put it differently, your images in cast paper ‘play’ with exploring different forms, while your etchings possess a quality of spaces vacated, of solitude – of meditating on pure line.
Did your work evolve to take a different perspective – so that you came to believe in the sole authenticity of line?
ZH: When I make a print, I am dealing with the proportions of the page, the border, and the margins around it. When I began working with cast paper, it freed me from that invariable, rectangular page. With paper sculptures I found the freedom to explore other shapes.
And although I have used colors in these sculptures, they are earth pigments: I use terra-rosa for brick-red, graphite for slate-gray and powdered charcoal for black. Each sculpture is monochromatic – it retains the purity of form.
GS: These forms in cast paper of the ‘80s are, if you like, interventions between earlier and later work. Your training at Hayter’s studio at Atelier 17 in Paris, from 1963-67, was to learn etching – and you were deeply inspired by Hayter. How did you turn to sculpture in cast paper?
ZH: When I returned to Delhi in 1967 and began working in my barsati/studio, I started with woodcuts – on handmade paper. This was my first introduction to working with hand made khadi paper: the roughness and texture opened me to the possibilities of working with spatial depth. I began to emboss my prints, which were then white on white. When I visited Sanganer in Rajasthan, I saw paper being made, liquid paper pulled on screens from the vats. I realized then the potential of paper pulp as a casting medium.
But to try this I had to wait until I came to live in New York in 1976. In 1978 I took a paper making class at a paper-mill. In 1979 I was invited to teach at the New York Feminist Art Institute of New York. Because they did not have technical facilities for etching, I suggested to them that I could teach papermaking. To prepare for classes, I read a lot about paper: the history, the geography, the chemistry of paper. All this changed the way I thought and worked with paper.
GS: When you came to New York, did certain artists influence you?
ZH: After I arrived in New York I became part of the community of women artists. My world changed radically – as it had also in Paris. I worked on the editorial board of ‘Heresies’ for their issue on Third World Artrists. Heresies was a journal of art and politics started by a collective of women artists and the art critic Lucy Lippard Until then I had no contact with the ‘other’ America: the Hispanics, the Afro- Americans, the American Indians and other discriminated minorities. This was the beginning of a new awareness. I also co-curated a show of Third World Women Artists, Dialectics of Isolation for AIR Gallery in New York.
It is true to say that women artists have changed the definition of sculpture. If you look at the work of Eva Hesse, she never worked in the traditional materials of bronze or marble… There was also the work of Agnes Martin, and Louise Bourgeois and Nancy Graves.
I saw the work of Eva Hesse at the Guggenheim, during my first visit to New York in 1973. She was exactly my age, but we belonged to different worlds. Still we were inspired by the same conditions prevailing in contemporary art.
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