by means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost language, but it is the desperateness of losing which picks flowers of memory binds the bouquet -Colette

 

Art, which encapsulates within its domain the images, forms, concepts, ideas, aesthetics and hermeneutically interpretive layers, originates from difference. This difference is produced and reproduced in representation of a range of discourses. 'Sexual differences' are not an immediately given fact of 'male' and 'female' identity but a whole process of differentiation. Questions of 'sexuality' and 'representation' are complicated discourses by their mutual entanglement. The concept of psychic construction of gender identity is reworked through Lacan as an understanding of the formation of subjectively within language. Then representation operates discursively and in relation to subjectively. This could be explained as the varied production of meanings, the matrix from which it evolves, and not forgetting the dynamic interaction and interplay of the artists approach to her lived environs including her powerful subconscious that largely defines her terrain for the emergence of types of visual images. Sharmila donning the mantle of artist -confident in her powers to 'create' -is aware that she has arrived projecting her prowess on this artistic domain to strike a posture of individuality.

 

The dominant centrality of Sharmila�s art is foreground in the female body. A body-text, which is at the centre, yet at the periphery, attempting to understand the familiar/unfamiliar, a process that takes place in the outermost corners of language, visual or otherwise, that she herself is in the centre of. A binary of centre/margin defines her desire to explore the place of the abject. This is the place where boundaries begin to break down, and she confronts an archaic space of self/other or subject/object. Opening up space, thus, for the reading of the unconscious, which Lacan defines 'as the discourse of the other'. Through body imagery Sharmila is interpreting her contingencies, ruptures, meanings, and she refers, 'What takes place then is the displacement of the insistence of the signified', Sharmila rejects the idea that art is mimetic or representational, for images in art are merely tropes or effects of language. And accordingly this dialectic affiliates with Julia Kristeva�s notion of cultural and personal identity, which recognizes that the strangeness of the other is the strangeness within.

 

The fictional obsolete silence of unconscious and absolutists subjectively gives in to the theory that �the unconscious is the ground of begins, unconscious is a language, where meaning is either in metaphor or in metonymy', Sharmila does move meanings into 'strategies of appropriation, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization, juxtaposition and so on', She does not make monologic body-text surface. Making relevant Kristeva�s notion, she does counteract what she sees as �necrophilia of earlier practices which study silent and dead body�. This argument is made relevant in the artist's work since her imagery of nudes eloquently subverts to project the live as dead as they gaze out either to the voyeuristic male or to the 'dead' world.

 

What constitutes for Sharmila the permanence of essence is its dislocution, mistranslation, and mispainting. 'Dislocution' would reference her disruption, dissolution of place, a topsy-turvy locality that captures the turbulence of contemporary experience. "My exile," says Sharmila, " 'Through the Looking Glass' (Lewis Carroll) is the hypertext. The painting 'Red Queen' is movement and stillness at once," This idea defies the constraints of linearity to spill elements, which churn up in speed, or create unending scenes of translation. The artist is not silent. The dissolution subverts the real.

 

Reading Poverty

 

Before the mirror, you let yourself inside
down to your gaze; which stayed in front immense
and didn�t say: I am that; no: this is
So free of curiosity your gaze
had became, so unpossessive, of such true
poverty�

Rilke

 

Reading 'poverty' is mapping genealogy of Sharmila's works towards heterogeneity, knowing what she has in her hands are bits of maps, memories, which were at the �outline; of body territory. The artist on self, which is in looking mirror image, is finding self in continuous process of breaking down. Regardless how irreconcilable or disparate the fragments are, she intends to set them at play with 'undecided possibilities', for locus of identification. A case in point would be her 'Red Queen', which is stillness of movement and movement, Red Queen of Stillness. This qualifies her identity consciousness on a reflecting surface or the imminence, marking it out to be a paradoxical text, which is inside of outside and is outside of inside.

 

'Cleansing' apparently is inside and outside on the same surface of narcissism and abjection (catharsis). The body under shower is in abjection taking one's own corpse and washing it. Water purifying and pouring down. At once the body is in the mirror 'down to its gaze'. On the left of the work is a drawing of a hand gesturing towards dependence/independence of the body in shower. The marking of the hand climbs up, while water falls suggesting notion of embarkation and disembarkation. Cleansing then is not in the reductive sense renunciation. Renouncement is obvious in the earlier example 'Girl in the Bar'. Cleansing or peeling of body that Sharmila demonstrates in her representations is what Kristeva calls �destruction�. The premise of standing body and diagonally falling body, which has no return, is also the site of a non-marked sword to plunge in from the ground from the 'enframing' of the impermanent body. Or is the body an envelope of invisible instrument of reconfiguration? If 'desire is lack' Red Queen is Queen of lack.

 

'Girl at the Bar' sets a contingent horizon. If this work is looked at in isolation for coherence and singularity of inspiration it may submit to the enquiry. At inquiry the expectation in the work is subversive and is locus of failure and rupture. There is an absence of alterity of what Sharmila finds in her successive works, 'Cleansing', 'Red Queen'. The glass in hand overpowers in half-light. The body does not speak and is a 'cocoon', what 'Red Queen' is not. In Lacanian terminology the "body is 'threshold' or 'borderline' a concept that includes notion of totality".

 

The present body is invented images between the dialectic of two dependent/independent marked signs in which one traces the other.

 

The Gaze
Gaze is a rather literary term for what could also be called 'looking' or 'watching'. It brings to mind the intensity in which knowledge and pleasure mingle. Most paintings allow us to 'lay down our gaze' and indulge our eyes in the illusion of fullness. The eye and gaze though splits are part of the same person for the gaze is projected, imagined. It is not the gaze of the real person but the result of our own struggle for self- mastery. The gaze then corresponds to desire, the desire for self-completion through the other. Sharmila�s works enter this terrain through the candid gaze of her nude female forms. In a dramatic turnaround Sharmila has translated the male voyeuristic gaze into a female one commanding attention to her sexuality through this transcription. The �gaze�, so to speak, is not desire with power attribute to male but defines its authority as absolute power in this conscious yet playful inversion through the female gaze. 'Since it is rather the game itself that plays, in that it draws the player into itself and thus itself becomes the actual subjectum of playing'.  Gadamer

 

The powerful image of the Red Queen repeats in her works. The complexity of the artist's ideology is consuming. It's an attempt at translation of her sexuality/being subconsciously into an arena to inscribe her fe/male authority. The signification of the Red Queen imagery surrounded by human seeds is precisely this. She calls attention to herself, her physical female trap, in the sense of making negotiation of identity, temporarily. Sharmila carries the critical edge of subject position and crisis of subjectivity. Red Queen dances signs of seduction -a Cosmic dance in memory. The simulation is real in a field of referrals and there is nothing outside. 'How can you know the dancer from the dance?' Yeat's question is cosmic dance. Decentering of binary positions, female/male, presence/absence, creation/destruction. This is the premise of Sharmila's works. Cleansing is dance, play, leela. Self-renunciation and self-discovery which is signification. 'Dancing Red Queen' is 'an incomplete work' and it is never complete as signs of feminine seduction.

 

The visual language deployed by Sharmila in her 'body' of work projects her ideology in the same breath. The colors are marginalized to concentrate on the fiery reds and acerbic greens, which as complements mark metonymically the position of center and margin. Her sfumatoish technique bespeaks her veiled intention� the power to inscribe authority through fe/male voyeurism. The binaries and dualities are conceptualized with equanimity to drive the thrust of her tensions and frustrations of establishing her identity being trapped in a female body. She seeks power, authority, liberation, individuality through the abject, to signpost her trace within the patriarchal cultural milieu.

 

The poverty and the unidealized nakedness of nervous calligraphic lines was the uncontested dialectic of the Madras School. A line, which is body and not free from human subject; here is where Sharmila finds locus of her migrations. Sharmila stands between two of her works, 'Gaze' and 'Teardrop.' 'This is only another beginning; the beginning is in the middle of my work and the next one is not my second one. I am always in the middle/border of my work in unrequited expectation.'