Every time I tend to describe my work, it takes me back to the waiting areas, to the emergencies, the test labs and the operation theatres of hospitals. Frequent visits to these places influence my visual vocabulary. Images of death, of disease and mutation, of power relations, of surveillance, of cold white light and after-images, of melancholy, of loss and anxiety refer to my work.

The photo-transfers have been conceived as intimate objects, as mementos of a lost civilization, as spectral images of the real. The error of light, of over exposure and underexposure is something that I have been exploring in my paintings. It’s the same exploration in prints except that in the transfer technique, more is left to chance.

My technique is all about layering, masking and overlapping whether it’s a painting, a print or a collage.

The preoccupation with animals in my work comes from the idea that they “are born, are sentient and mortal. In those things they resemble man. In their superficial anatomy, in their habits, in their physical capacities, they differ from man. They are both like and unlike. Only in death do these two parallel lines converge. It’s been a companionship, a power relation that has been there since the dawn of time. To the same degree as man has raised himself from the state of nature, the animals have fallen below it, been conquered and turned into slaves.”

Violence and death, mutation, loss and anxiety in the local scenario are getting a lot of coverage by the media and the internet. The human body is frail and these are facts of life and have always been present but the onslaught of such images is nerve wrecking. New ways of violence and subjugation are being invented day by day. This imagery is also informing my visual vocabulary.