Have you ever noticed a crack peeling away to reveal slabs of paint, dented concrete, and the interiors of a structure that once was? The multiplicity of layers invites me to question the stories embedded within the once perfect walls. The visualisation is an attempt to describe the varied facets of Chandigarh based artist, Ashima Raizada’s practice; that peels away patterns, shapes, shadows, forms, and fabrics to uncover tales of inward and outward expression hidden beneath the skin.

In a tango between photographs, stray thoughts, scribbles, geometrical lines, self-portraiture, and found objects, Raizada reflects on “many things and the space that carries those many things.” She introduces herself as a self-taught artist and elaborates that while her photographic and drawing practice emerged out of her curiosity and experimentation with technological interfaces, her paintings stem from a specific invocation of feminist subjectivity. This has now wandered into her photographic practice as well, as we see striking self-portraits seamlessly embedding themselves into terrestrial lands, and futuristic landscapes.

It is obvious that the artist is a strong believer in play and interaction, melding and moulding her thoughts into fragments that can be seen, touched, and held, while constantly being bewildered by the unexpectedness of her interventions. As she explains over a Zoom call from Chandigarh, the playfulness in her work is probably a result of her tryst with engineering and a scientific bend during her college years. “When I was in my second year of college, I realised that I was rather bored with my curriculum, and I wanted to find more meaning and purpose to spending my days. I wasn’t encouraged to experiment with my assignments, and it built the urge to deviate from this straightforward way of life,” elaborates Raizada.

After cutting a deal with her folks about completing her degree in electronics and communication, and then exploring avenues away from the science sector, she has now move completely towards the arts, and even had her own solo show in April this year. Titled It all leads to the same place, in collaboration with Terrain.art, it brings together a spectrum of works she’s created over the years on the ideas of self and it’s translation into materiality. “When I reflect on my growing years, my parents tell me that art was something that I would explore in bursts, but never stuck around with,” says the enthusiastic experimenter.

It was only in 2014-2015 that she first began making numerous photographs of architecture, the city of Chandigarh, the geometry of nature, and emerging shapes in everyday life. She also practiced the art of editing, and studied the elements of temperature, saturation, contrast, and the mysteries of black and white imagery to further develop her visual language. Raizada elucidates “now, I’m at a point where I can go through my archive and decipher if I want to leave a photograph in isolation or add mix-media to further its narrative.”

As I poured over the artist’s earlier works, I noticed that even her single-framed photographs have recurring motifs of layering, divisions through cable lines, window panes, or reflections, and move towards a central point of alignment. When addressed, Raizada introspects on the architecture of Chandigarh heavily influencing her ways of seeing. It isn’t surprising, since the city planned by French architect Le Corbusier, is considered to be one of the most successful experiments in urban planning, and modernist architecture of the twentieth century in India. Having visited the famous Capitol Complex myself, Raizada’s inclination towards dimensionality is further cemented. “Earlier, I was creating more out of intuition and less out of thought. But now when I look at my work, I’m not only noticing the fragments, but the larger picture and it all starts to fall into place,” she muses.

A voracious reader of art and it’s numerous form, Raizada’s curiosity about processes, origin of concepts, breaking down influential artists and their practices, are all an avenue to understanding this highly subjective field. She is heavily influenced by artists who are raw in their expression, and manage to channelise their thoughts without being limited by a singular medium. In particular, she is intrigued by the work of American artist, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), who is considered to have anticipated the Pop-Art movement, during a time when Abstract Expressionism was dominant. As mentioned by the MoMA, in his landmark series of Combines (1954–64) he mixed the materials of artmaking with ordinary things, writing, “I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint.” For Raizada, he was creating and communicating in a language that was free flowing, less restrictive, and unconfined – all processes that she is attracted to.

While scrolling through the evenly divided grids on the artist’s Instagram, I notice a multitude of eyes peering out of the screen. In the form of both, photographs and sketches, they sometime seek subjects within the frame, and at other times gaze at the viewer with softness and ferocity. The recurring theme makes me wonder if it’s a way for Raizada to assert her presence amidst her own thoughts, especially since we converse about her newly acquired acceptance of growing within her art without needing to completely understand it. The idea is peacefully nestled in her belief that exposition is often unnecessary, because as she puts it - “if everything had to be said, you wouldn’t be creating art.”

You can find more of the artist’s work on www.instagram.com/ashimaraizada