Anchors, invisible on the surface, sink deep to steady large vessels from drifting. Roots crawl delicately and then gnarl with time, reaching in directions away from the trees they keep alive. This tension, fragile yet strong, allows a weightlessness of being in what Alpana Vij calls The Weight of Small Things.
On first encountering Vij’s work, one sees abstraction activated through movement, depth, texture and intimacy. However, with sustained reflection, the marks twigs make, the patterns layered stones repeat and the surfaces that defy their mediums begin to emerge as a language. At first indecipherable, it begins to reveal the outline of a grid.
The grid has been a recurring form in Vij’s artistic journey. It allows for the weight of a measure to enter as an undercurrent to her practice. Invisible in its scaffolding-like support, it provides structure while also allowing a rhythm to exist within the fragility of fragments floating on a wall. Language enters through this unspoken linearity, emerging and dissolving into the form of an image, here collections of leaves, twigs, driftwood, concrete and stones.
The materials Vij explores travel between repair and manipulation. She questions the peripheries of nature in the conception of the human mind. Worn leaves are mended carefully with fine stitching, while fractured twigs float whole again, held upright by a thin new bronze spine. By mending nature while also concretising it, she plays with the
dichotomy of fragility. During these interventions, Vij narrativises each object’s journey, building associations of memory into each work. Discarded life forms are given a renewed chance in Vij’s work through her instincts for care. Moments of imperfection and outward mending become, for her, internal acts of healing. The depth she ascribes to beauty is not separate from the acts of care through which she brings about change.
Drawn to the mundane, Vij creates movement where there is stillness, and pause where there is none. She is drawn to the Buddhist concept of Śūnyatā, in which, emptying the self leads her to an understanding of her relationships with humanity, materiality and non-linear time. Her eyes and mind wander through parks, as she picks up to drying leaves and twigs. A reiki practitioner, Vij often stops in passing to heal a fallen tree, or to stitch a torn leaf with gold thread before returning it to the earth. These are some of her many acts of mending. She approaches the vastness of nature with a desire to ascribe a reality to human conditioning and to trace paths that move in interconnected ways. Her practice, rooted in tension, is equally focused on the idea of repair and on introducing the possibility of growth.
Growth in its essence suggests a weighted retardation of time that stretches suffering across milliseconds and years. Vij arrives at resolutions in her practice not through stillness but through a discovery of measure that works within the slow time that exists in nature. It is here, in the weight of small things, that life emerges back onto the grid, towards a lightness that balances on tensions rooted in The Weight of Small Things.
- Veeranganakumari Solanki