Garima Gupta b. 1985
Morning After the Flood, 2024
Pastels and colour pencils on paper
(HSN Code: 970110)
(HSN Code: 970110)
17.5 X 12 inches each
Set of 3
Set of 3
Copyright Garima Gupta, 2024
'40 years ago my parents built their home across the river, in a place referred to as Jamna- paar (across the river Yamuna). The river formed a quasi city limit...
"40 years ago my parents built their home across the river, in a place referred to as Jamna- paar (across the river Yamuna). The river formed a quasi city limit and across it was a kind of lesser-land for the less fortunate. I have memories of the river flooding in the low-lying areas of ‘Jamna-paar’. It was a yearly ritual of the river soaring and pushing a large population of farmers onto the then two-lane ITO bridge, forcing them to set up temporary camps. For those of us who lived across the Jamna, flood was a word with an image attached to it. As the years passed the river was artificially shrunk - embanked, barraged, diverted. The river no longer floods at the ITO bridge.
Last year in the Amazon rainforest I slept to the sound of heavy rains. The morning after I saw that the river was in a trance, moving and washing over everything in its path. I watched a river flood after years. A part of me froze seeing the force and might of this river that had no intention of sparing anything or anyone. Large trees, broken boats, parts of the forest were now all seamlessly absorbed in its swollen width. As the waters settled, we sat in a boat to leave. Settled is a lousy word for what was happening all around that boat. Tree trunks repeatedly smashed into the bow while flotsam passed us by in great rush.
What I have made here are fictionalised drawings of things I had seen in the rainforest as if they did not survive that flood; a fruit and a colony of ants feeding off of it, a strangler fig tree that had devoured its host and a domesticated macaw whose flight feathers were clipped so it couldn’t fly too far. They comprise of a facet of the natural or nature that we have overlooked — annihilating, ferocious and even depraved. The common thread was a flood that did not distinguish between the dead and its pillager, a host and its parasite or even the mutilated and the depraved; undoing both parties — the yielding and the feral — with equal force.
I drew these as an exercise in preparing against future freeze reactions - to keep a flood in my active memory so my body will not lose agency at the sight of tree trunks repeatedly smashing into the bow and flotsam passing by in great rush."
Last year in the Amazon rainforest I slept to the sound of heavy rains. The morning after I saw that the river was in a trance, moving and washing over everything in its path. I watched a river flood after years. A part of me froze seeing the force and might of this river that had no intention of sparing anything or anyone. Large trees, broken boats, parts of the forest were now all seamlessly absorbed in its swollen width. As the waters settled, we sat in a boat to leave. Settled is a lousy word for what was happening all around that boat. Tree trunks repeatedly smashed into the bow while flotsam passed us by in great rush.
What I have made here are fictionalised drawings of things I had seen in the rainforest as if they did not survive that flood; a fruit and a colony of ants feeding off of it, a strangler fig tree that had devoured its host and a domesticated macaw whose flight feathers were clipped so it couldn’t fly too far. They comprise of a facet of the natural or nature that we have overlooked — annihilating, ferocious and even depraved. The common thread was a flood that did not distinguish between the dead and its pillager, a host and its parasite or even the mutilated and the depraved; undoing both parties — the yielding and the feral — with equal force.
I drew these as an exercise in preparing against future freeze reactions - to keep a flood in my active memory so my body will not lose agency at the sight of tree trunks repeatedly smashing into the bow and flotsam passing by in great rush."