Manisha Parekh
Wings
Across this series, the eye traces, over and over, several circular paths. They overlap and diverge, delineating restless movement within an amorphous boundary. Loops intersect to form wings, offering an escape from confinement. They come together, and come undone.
Completed at the end of 2021, using watercolour and ink on paper, Wings began with the observation of petals falling off a branch from a window in the artist’s studio. This mundane activity led to a suite of gestural abstractions, built layer upon layer, much like the rest of Parekh’s oeuvre. Although they were all made in a state of enforced stillness, these works prompt contemplation of flight — how the mind can soar out of its given limits and find itself elsewhere.
Alongside place, Wings brings into focus an altered experience of time. The suspension of the present allows opportunities to relive fragments of memories from the past, and creates an urgency to imagine alternate futures. For most, these exercises of reflection have moved along paths of incertitude, and continue to do so, as hope is contained within fog and blur.
Parekh’s work has always suggested the possibility of vastly different scales within the same image. While the varying orbits in Wings trace the movements of the individual, they equally outline collective negotiations within a shared landscape of fear and grief. Despite the distance, we circle back to hold each other. Even in isolation, there remain possibilities of encounter. That is, flight itself—out of an oppressive blankness.
— Zeenat Nagree
