The room remembers

There is not one person in Nitya Bhaumik Joshi’s drawings. There is a chair. A door. A bed. A pair of slippers. For her final work she put away her paints and drew the rooms of her home in charcoal.

Nitya walked through her home with a camera and took pictures of it as it was. Not tidy. Not perfect. A chair pushed back. A door left open. Light lying across the floor. She wanted the rooms to show that someone lives there, without showing anyone at all. “Can human presence be felt through objects,” she asks, “without showing an actual person?”

She graduated this year from Anant National University in Ahmedabad. Her final work became a series about the ordinary things we live among. “Even in absence,” she writes, “a room continues to perform memory.”

A veil of dust on a bottle. A crumpled piece of clothing. A cloth hanging from an open cupboard. At first she set out to draw emptiness. The rooms gave her a different answer.

Two drawings meet at an uneven cut, like two photographs laid side by side. A chair, its shadow and the light that falls past it. “Though there is no human in my work,” she writes, “there is human presence felt.”

Putting away the colours

Nitya had always seen herself as a painter. So she began to paint her photographs. Halfway through, she stopped.

The colour was taking the silence away. “I always saw charcoal and pencil as something used for sketching,” she writes. Then she changed her mind. An artist, she decided, “must choose what conveys my thoughts truly, rather than what medium gets more validation.”

A chair. A door. A slipper on the floor. Look long enough and the room looks back.

The rooms are still with her. Next she wants to take them into new materials. “I too am a voice between the million voices finding their space in the art world,” she says. “And I am as excited to listen to them.”

Read Issue One, with all eight films →
More about Nitya, and Nitya’s works in the catalogue →