Attachment

A series of family “portraits”

oil on canvas
40 x 50 cm

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new delhi
2014

Our face gives us perhaps the greatest sense of our personal identity, every day of our lives from birth to death. And yet, we can never actually see our own faces first-hand. We can only ever see a reflection or a representation. Only those around us really know our faces.

Moreover, the faces we come to know best over the course of our lives are those of our family. Yet, how well do we really know these faces? How much of what we think of those faces is factual, and how much of it is our own perception, bias, aversion, our own identity? And does that perception match that person’s own sense of identity?

The artist explores the faces that she has known all her life, and tries to observe them as objectively as possible, without putting her own attachment or biases into her paintings, in an attempt to become aware of her attachment to these faces, and to her own sense of identity through the features she (supposedly) shares with these family members. The larger-than-life, closely cropped portraits force both artist and viewer to pay attention to facial features in an unnatural way, making those confronting features themselves the actual subjects of the paintings, rather than the recognisable person.

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