Extending the Line is an ongoing series that explores the relationship between light, space, and perception. Unfolding through time and made across different formats, the series includes photographs, drawings, and an installation. The initial engagement began in 2013 during a month-long residency at Space 118, Mumbai. It was at the residence that I was staying in, where the changing conditions of light entering within the architecture became an object of immediate attention. I became interested in the temporary spatial forms created by the interaction of natural and artificial light within the architectural space, and subsequently started documenting the very phenomenon as an initial point of inquiry within the series.

Extending the Line: Photographs is a suite of ten photographs that aimed to capture the fleeting spatial conditions where light and shadow collectively generated geometric configurations across walls, floors and ceilings. Emerging from an encounter with lines, forms, gradations, and shapes, a visual dialogue unfolded through the interaction between structural elements, daylight, and time. The work required sustained attention to the subtle, ephemeral changes occurring within the architectural space over the course of the day. Each frame here emerges from a particular, personalised way of looking, focusing and composing. By isolating these conditions, the images transform ordinary architectural spaces into ambiguous compositions that resemble drawings or constructed forms. The built composition resembles an abstract form, encountered through fragments, tonal variations and shifting geometries.

Extending the Line: Photographs – Suite of 10 Photographs
2013
Digital Print on Hehnemuhle Paper

While making these photographs, questions such as what is a drawing? began to surface. Does the medium define a drawing, or do other elements like line, form, shade and structure become its essence? This interest in lines and forms also opened up a relational tension between presence and absence, raising the critical question of what is real and what is unreal or simply constructed through perception.

This became the next point of extension, where the photographs gradually became a starting point for subsequent drawings within the series. Extending the Line: Drawings is a suite of ten drawings, where the spatial awareness within the photographs allowed the lines to move beyond the visual frame, and thereby resulting in the idea of responsive drawing. By extending fragments of lines from black and white visuals onto the surrounding paper, the empty space of the page became an active field where architecture could continue to unfold beyond what was visible in the printed image. The photographs were deliberately positioned away from the centre, often towards a corner or the edges, leaving a substantial field of paper around it to further extend and engage with. Using white and black oil pastel, incisions, and etching on the paper, the work becomes a field of spatial continuation and transformation, allowing the line to move past the boundaries of an image, occupy the surrounding surface, and suggest a space that exceeds beyond what is immediately visible.

Extending the Line: Drawings– Suite of 10 Drawings
2013
Oil Pastel and Etching on Archival Paper

Later, this desire to continue the photographic works and drawings beyond their fixed frames and into the space, resulted in the making of ‘Extending the Line: Installation’ in 2020. Composed of five different panels, the installation work examined how space is perceived rather than simply represented. Building onto the previously created framed drawings within the same series, it translated their visual language into a spatial configuration through both line and form. The installation employs the use of a range of materials such as white threads, needles, permanent marker and oil paint on canvas stretched across the five wooden panels. The structural elements within the photographs either extend or respond to the surrounding surface. The lines also extend onto the surface of canvas from the drawings itself. The work also delves into an interplay of light and shadow within the spatial environment, something that is fundamental to the photographic works.There exists an act of weaving here that encompasses both a specialised physical process and a conceptual method for connecting the disparate elements that are produced at different moments in time, into a single unified visual composition. The series, ‘Extending the Line’, remains an ongoing inquiry into the parameters of space, i.e. the planar space of a paper, the three-dimensional physical space adjacent to it, and the constant dialogue that exists in between them.

Extending the Line: Installation – Suite 5 Panels
2020
Framed Drawings, Thread, Needles, Permanent Marker and Oil Paint on Canvas Stretched on Board