Seema Kohli speaks to Shrabasti Mallik about the concept of her exhibition Golden Womb, which she conceptualised while coming to terms with her mother’s death. She shares details about her belief in the existence of soul
Seema Kohli’s work exuberates brilliance of colours and strangeness of figures. But what strikes the viewers is the mysterious orb that hangs over her oeuvre, sometimes in paint and sometimes in spirit. It is the golden womb, which she calls, “my refrain, my leitmotif and the centre of my artistic vision.”
A sense of afterlife, cosmic belief and the existence of a soul describe all her paintings. “I believe that the ceremonies and rituals performed after death is a ceremony for the soul before it enters its next bodily cage,” she says and adds that, “the soul exists and I believe that there is a journey that it covers.” It was this that prompted her to experiment with deeper thoughts and express them on canvas.
Few of her exhibits at the Art Heritage Gallery are a part of a bigger collection titled Golden Womb. To her, the womb represents the perfect half way house, between the material and the divine, it’s where we let go of our cosmic consciousness and finally take on the human condition, forgetting where we came from and what it all means. She says, “This is where I have spent nine months of my life. My mind was still unformed and my body still undecided. It was because I had more time that I started making my art an unfurling chronicle of a memory and the narrative of my journey.”
In her exhibit, one can find an image of a deer surrounded by trees. In the same image one can see a woman’s hair connected to the horns of the deer and also to the roots of the trees. There are also other deers which are intertwined with the wings of birds. She says, “I want to depict that everything starts from nature and that everything is connected with each other.” Other paintings show tea cups on top of a tree, which converts into branches.
Death of her mother compelled her to listen to shlokas form the ancient scriptures. She says, “It gave me a lot of solace and I started to think about the concept of energy and how it can never be destroyed.” That turned into the subjects of her paintings, which she describes as, “procreation. Everything in life is constantly been recycled — from a person’s soul to its positive and negative energies.”
She projects these abstract subjects on canvas through her mixed media work — silver and gold leaf, acrylic on canvas and gouache. Gouache, she explains, “is a type of paint consisting of pigment, a binding agent and sometimes added inert material, designed to be used in an opaque method.”
Her brush excavates, discovers and brings into focus, sights and sounds of this world within a world, capturing creation in creation, unearthing the cycle of life from under the miscellany of living. “It’s from deep inside the womb that I get my inspiration. I feel like an insider giving you glimpses of stories and songs that only I have witnessed,” she says. The exhibition will continue till November 20.