N. Dash

N. Dash’s work is based on the daily repetition of a kind of ritual. For more than ten years she has been photographing pieces of canvas, which she carries around with her like a kind of fetish, and which she constantly caresses, tears and kneads. This constant contact transforms the small pieces into a tangle of small bits and isolated knots, like “unstable and changing sculptures”. By greatly enlarging their photos, independent works of art emerge from this incessant “creative process”. Similarly, in her arte povera-like “sculpture-paintings”, N Dash treats pre-industrial and organic materials such as jute, linen, rope, graphite, pigment and clay in an almost ritualistic way. She ‘kneads’ them into their support, for example, a linen painter’s canvas, until geometrically abstracted images appear.