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Title : "Wild child" from the series "The forest I return to"
Project at India Art Fair 2025 supported by Royal College of Art London.
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Artist's Statement on "Wild Child"
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it was to create, but it was more of like beauty I wanted to honestly paint down a letter to myself, more
like composing a music and weaving through the notes of the violin and stitching through the keys of the harmonium.
Like murmuring by composing a song, As the work process went on I felt more like a musician as
the hand went side updown, inbetween the taan's and keys, like Waltz in C sharp minor OP 64
no 2.
It didn't have any voice but it was speaking to me through the creeks,
Which from the first has shone on ages past,
Enlights the present, and shall warm the last
Though each may feel increase and decays,
And sees now clearer and now darker days
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FOREST THAT I RETURN TO
Imon Phukan
Presented by IAF Artist-in-Residence Programme In partnership with Royal College of Art (RCA), London, An image can hold differing consciousness in our minds. A painting can be dreamt of as a sculpture. Imon Phukan is one such artist who erases and tears the pictures that have formed in her mind. Loss opens up as windows made of strips of cloth that emerge from the painting. She invites you to touch them, close them and rub them open. Tactility as manifested by something you can tug on is the result of creating a work that she wants to be alive. When she returns to her forest, it is a place whose canopy gathers a foliage of memory. The loss of a parent in her case a father) can have the world calling you a 'Wild Child'. As if the wilderness is something unappreciated, holding on to one's freedom can be a confrontational stance against the structure of society. How one should sculpt or paint or arrange art can be determined by pedagogies that are drawn and inspired by artistic failure.Imon Phukan (2000) born in Guwahati studied a bachelors in painting at the MS University, Baroda and thereafter has recently graduated from theRoyal College of Arts, London with a Masters in Sculpture. She is currently resident at Space Studios, Ilford, London. She wants to travel the forests alone, a thought that often occurred while peering into the hills in front of her home in Narkasur Kahlilipara, a town near Guwahati. According to folk history these forested hills are home to the demon Narkasur. Imon was always intrigued by his presence and wished to seek what was not allowed, accepted and agreed to. These were her Wild,Thoughts poems she etchies into her canvas. This process of writing her thoughts remains present, but unseen to the viewerShe doesn't abandon panting she swims in the vast expanse of cloth which is stuck and stitched together as Alice would in wonderland. Go and find her self-portraits in the display. You are invited to enter a reaim of an illusory fear Under the canopy the floral flourishes and coolness falls on the forest floor. It's a portrait of our mind. We disassociate from our tragedies the memories of deep grief and our resurrection becomes a bouquet of those wery experiences. Using twigs and branches from NSIC grounds she floats her tapestries as extensions of her body-singing out a line "You say I complete a body as a songwriter! Living in the cold metropolis of London, a diasporic existence can be a lesson in self-perception. Escapes to county forests, meadows and occasional visits to the beach become exercise in rejuvenation. The Durdle Door' in Dorset an arched cliff denuded by the sea comes to resonate in her canvas windows. While twigs from Hyde Park become armatures to her cloth sculptures that she sees as self-portraits of herself. Imon Phukan steps out of every box we might try to place her in, she denies being a painter or a sculptor as much as the denies her domesticity in the city, forever seeking her wilderness.​ This is the promise the had made to her father Udaijyoti Chetia Phukan never deny herself her dreams.These sentimentality within her works is a monument this memory.​
BY SUMESH SHARMA
Curator " Forest that I return to"
INDEPENDENT CURATOR
CO FOUNDER CLARK HOUSE INITIATIVE
NOW STRANGERS HOUSE GALLERY
