The world is becoming increasingly complex and ugly through greedy politicians and the resultant life they are creating. For a woman another ugly dimension to life is added through the sheer fact of her gender, which creates real images, almost daily in the Indian media, (or just gets lost within concrete walls of shame) of the one Rasa of Indian art aesthetics- Vibhatsa Rasa - horrible, repulsive images of raped and mutilated, murdered women, thrown out to the world for the strange macabre voyeuristic pleasure of someone else's suffering.
Well for me, even protected by a small town community while growing up, the ugliness of unwanted sexual advances were always waiting around the dark corners of lanes and houses. Advances that couldn't be averted, because life had to go on, but left very deep scars within me, that never quite healed. A sense of suffering is always running within my skin.
Being able to express my feelings through art has been a cathartic journey for me, which doesn't seem to end. My works hence, always carry that undercurrent of menace and pathos, despite depicting various aspects of my personal life or social issues that have affected me somehow.
The skin of an artist, especially a woman artist, is painfully stretched thin over her consciousness, like an overblown balloon, that a pinprick of malice, hurtful gossip, social stigma can burst and shatter to ground zero and underneath. I create my works from that miasma of pain born out of my variously covertly or overtly abused sexuality. The numerous, almost daily committed rape cases of India deeply distress me, and images churn inside me to burst forth, but my consciousness doesn't know quite how to express the enormity of despair and pain.
It's a work in progress, a magma churning and heaving....
-- Chandrima Bhattacharyya
