s t o n e t i m e ( 2020 - 2022 )
Stone and Time – two concepts have intrigued me since childhood. Time is abstract. We cannot see, feel or control it. In terms of my work, oftentimes, I have managed to compartmentalise my time. For me that is control. Similarly, the way a stone represents great magnitudes of time – people hold respect and their whole lives. I see time within the stone and other times stone within time. The portraits of the stones that have found their places in the display are myself portraits.
I landed in New York from Bangladesh in December 2019. From December 2019 to March 2022, many of the works I have painted have found a spot in this solo exhibition. Some of these were produced in an apartment in Brooklyn, New York, where COVID-19 had established a terrifying presence. When George Floyd loses his life, monumental protests were orchestrated throughout the city, Black Lives Matter campaigns and student organised movements carve out a defining resistance against injustice like a morning sky with a bright blazing sun. During such turmoil these stones revealed themselves to be the letters that spelled out and formed time, strength, hope and resistance for me. I used these letters to write the diary for the succeeding days. It blended with Socrates, Plato, Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides, Sophocles, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Ottoman Empire, Medici, etc. It blended with everyone around me, the man-made constructs and the beauty of nature and sometimes even just silence. My conversations with my everyday environments kept me busy when I was so far away from all my family, and it never made me feel alone.
I spent the next year in the state of Tennessee with my children, in a town called Jellico, a beautiful small hilly town. Our house lay on the face of an enormous mountain on Kabir Lane, where I spent all the seasons of that year, where the form, taste, touch and smell granted me a worldly solace, as though I recovered myself from a past life. The dust-and-mud-smeared me from those bygone days in Libya. Just like every other person from a COVID stricken part of this world, contact with nature from outside of society allowed me to reconnect with it. The scariest animal in life - snake, ended up being my friend. I was as the grass, as the sand, as the air and as the stones.
The most memorable moments of my childhood were in Libya. My father joined an engineering firm, and we ended up living in a heavenly town called Bir-tarfas. The only type of school around was Arabic. As a result, I was homeschooled and all the books I studied came from Dhaka. I spent most of my time there wandering and exploring the countryscapes and forests. My companions were a tamed rabbit and a striped cat named Tutu. Beside us wandered red, black and white scorpions, with tails upraised. With them I used to dig out rocks and with endless curiosity, I wondered where they came from how much time has been preserved inside them. To this day, the memories of the smell and form of the stones and wild flowers there hold a world of delight for me.
My introduction to ancient Mediterranean civilisation was in Libya. Traces of ancient Roman civilisation are scattered throughout Libya. Inspecting these remnants was our entertainment for almost every week. I used to think in amazement that this was how people leave their marks on the world, or live on through their marks. These marks are created on objects. This was how in all my different works, Memory and Marks become the connecting theme.
Using pieces or all of rocks, I confirm my existence in various mediums. Sometimes, using ballpoint pens, pencils or water colour, sometimes using the shed winter leaves or the spring flowers and petals from mountainsides, or charred remains of vegetables, breaking stones into dust, I have continued to express my heartfelt emotions.
In place of brushes, oftentimes I have used stones to be the method of my mark-making. Jellico had made me an intricate, intertwined part of nature, something I might live on to this day. In August 2021, I returned to New York again, starting a new life with my family. Making a studio in my home, I started working on the idea of the formation of a stone that has experienced history. At one point it seemed to me, to be similar to the idea of a human maturing. I was completely engrossed with creating the form of stones, using diluted black acrylic colour - layering it on a white canvas with watercolour technique. I also glorified stones by painting it in gold colour on Black canvas. I put gold leaf on some stones, collected decades before, and made few 3-dimensional presentations. I entered a state of mind where the stone's existence reflected my unearthly soul. The soul that emerges from the infinite time to the womb. Yet, I know not of where my soul resides. In order to understand my existence and ask the important questions of life - who am I and why am I on Earth - these persisting questions embody the philosophy and expression of this exhibition. The end of it, to me, is unknown.
-Bipasha Hayat