Duration: 2015 – ongoing
Medium: Albumen Prints from digital negatives.
I was perceived as too ‘feminine’ throughout my adolescence. I faced bullying and struggled with body image issues. I began experimenting with nude self-portraits, constructing narratives as a way to navigate my pain. Isolated in a room from all the unrest around me, making these photographs of myself grounded me and gave me a way to build a relationship of acceptance with myself. Working as a freelancer took me places. Travelling alone gave me the headspace to immerse myself in a private space of a hotel room that I occupied temporarily.
For the last seven years, I have been working on a body of work titled Hotel Rooms, themed around fluid male sexuality, mental health, queerness, and challenging deep-rooted societal gender binaries. In this project I document my vulnerabilities, visually journaling how much I have changed physically and mentally through various hotel rooms I have been in over the years. Further, the photographs are hand-printed using 19th century printmaking methodologies. This slow method which is at the intersection of art and chemistry, dependent upon the clock of the universe, democratised the act of printmaking.
As a way of responding to my environment, the marriage of the self-portraits and alternative printmaking enables me to stretch time creatively, in a chaotically fast-paced world. Because the work involves the physical body, printing them using my hands made artistic and logical sense. That way, from conceptualising, to shooting, to processing, to printing, I have complete ownership of the process. The alternative process print is a result of an active manual process, embodying every emotion that the image has to offer, in the most historically original voice of the medium. Anyone grappling with issues involving body image, sexuality, and bullying can seek solace in this work.
Upon completion of my first residency program at the Maze Collective Studio, I extended myself beyond the dark confinement of four walls. Shooting in the open Aravali Biodiversity Forest initiated a new chapter in my artistic journey. Moving beyond the rooms, my current exploration of making self-portraits resonates with the wilderness as a private space in public, affirming the primal relationship between humans and nature.
