Bending the Wire: Beyond the Linear

Puneet Kaushik is a Delhi based artist. Having studied, lived and worked at Berkeley, California, USA for almost a decade, he returned home to Delhi with sentiments and nostalgia of sinking roots within his cultural milieu. His installations are three dimensional sculptures that negate normative definition. The works are either crocheted or woven with very fine steel wire mesh and for a change latex rubber and Faux fur. As an expansive versatile medium it is premised on the condition of interaction, stimulating dialogues or another response with the spectator. Puneet in his installations successfully has been driven by a single idea or concept, injecting an element of exploration, with materials offering their own guiding agency; and in this respect he marks a posture of difference.

In his last show, the concept of 'Germination' foregrounds sinking roots and is a liminal phenomenon - a beginning of a journey which breaks the rigors of silence for change and transformation. The metaphor indicates germination or externalization of inner energies both positive and negative. And the visualization of such abstract feelings is threaded through engagement with the medium of installation and using craft processes, which also enables Puneet to foreground traditions via contemporary materials as stainless steel. In his works, the sense of presence and the body in relation to human experience was investigated.

In the present show, the body per se is subverted but the intervention with it is to explore his concept which involves the process of life; which his art metaphorically redefines. For instance, in a work, the crocheted forms with long lengths of latex rubber hang from the ceiling, which create an enigma, the mystery of the 'self' as it goes through thorny and problematic conditions when uprooted from its comfort zone and forced to take roots elsewhere. His many forms have emerged through his experiences by looking at the latter in a holistic manner in order to recognise it as a process that bridge individuals and the world. According to Merleau-Ponty, the human body is an expressive space which contributes to the significance of personal actions. The body is also the origin of expressive movement, and is a medium for perception of the world. Bodily experience gives perception a meaning beyond that established simply by thought.

This sense of expressive body spatiality has been worked through by Puneet with his material. Phenomenologically, his sculpted crocheted form, invites spectators to touch, feel and hence create dialogue with it. That his forms are not dense; rather contain interlocking spaces, with a particular silence found in the spaces between forms creating a dialectics of visual pattern, wrought by the craft process of weaving and crochet.

Puneet Kaushik