2017 - ongoing project

I began to think about the depths we search to find the shipwreck, to find love, the objects we carry across the ocean to other lands.

Objects from the Deep began in 2015, and the drawings unravelled slowly. Images submerged in our memory often surface in different forms.

Beached is still quite elusive to me, but I want the viewer to read it as an embodied being, both whale and vessel traversing the ocean, beached or marooned on land. The vessel morphs into something fleshy, reminiscent of the whale. And within the dark space, the abyss contained in the boat, is a liquid, the ocean.

‘It's a mammalian vessel in which two massive objects traversing the deep, two opposites, coalesce: the organic whale and the industrial ship.’ (Ananya Kabir).

These conceptual drawings reflect on the sedimented nature of objects in the depths of the ocean. The intimate pull between object, material and nature fuses and erases the differences of place and identity and becomes a site of confluence and transformation.

Text by Naiza Khan