Geeti Sen: Zarina, your involvement with paper and its possibilities spans your entire life, and it defines your creative expression. This exhibition so aptly titled Kaghaz ke Ghar reviews your images in cast paper from the 1980s.

ZH: Don’t you think it is a good title? Houses of Paper is a play on words both literally and metaphorically. All the works in this exhibition are made of paper; most of them cast from paper pulp, some cut from printed paper and others are prints. Paper is fragile, and resilient.

Thematically also, these forms in cast paper address the idea of the house / home which has engaged me for years. There is an early sculpture from 1980 which I call Spaces to Hide. Another cast paper Twisted House,1984; several forms focus on structural elements of the house, Wall, Roof, Steps, Corners; then the house extends into the garden with the Seed, Rock, Lotus and Phool (Flower).

GS: Because these images in cast paper are tangible, they substantiate the idea of permanence; yet they retrieve the past and yield to the idea of impermanence. Your etchings again titled House at Aligarh (1990) and House with Four Walls (1991) are defined with lines immutable – but they trace a world that has disappeared. These implicit contradictions of permanence/ impermanence makes your images unique.


When the Twisted House was exhibited in New York in the show of Women Artists of the ‘80s, New Talent, the catalogue carried an intriguing interpretation: “All this is a glimpse of something outside and bigger than oneself and yet within”.

ZH: My sculptures in cast paper are solid. I like the malleability of paper pulp. The pulp is thick, sometimes hard to mould. When I made the large sculpture Lotus (1982) which is 25 by 30 inches, I constructed the negative mould in plexiglass. Again Steps (1980) is like a step-well, and this mould also was constructed in plexiglass.

But I have never been attracted to using plastic for the finished work. I am drawn to natural mediums such as wood, clay and paper. You can discover a fault here or there, you can find gradations in color. Using paper is like working on clay… paper is like working on your own skin.

GS: There are affinities with your etchings following in the 1990s. Spaces to Hide (1980) corresponds to your etching with the same title. This image anticipates also your etchings titled House at Aligarh of 1990 and House with Four Walls of 1991. In place of lines you have pitted the surface here with triangular perforations, but again you use a grid plan.

By the way, that is an interesting title! Why did you call it Spaces to Hide?

ZH: When I came to New York and was looking for a place to live, I read the signs outside the building: ‘Space to Rent.” This transformed to Spaces to Hide; at that time I was looking for a place to hide, a place of my own. And I have lived in this space since 1976, for thirty years.

GS: That was a significant turning point when you chose to settle down in New York on your own. Your personal history is written into every image.

I find a distinction between your etchings and woodcuts of the 1990s and these earlier works. Your images in cast paper seem to me to be more personal, more sensuous: the Seed, the Lotus, the Shrine use curves, and they vibrate with color. Your etchings are more restrained -- distilling from memory its essence. To put it differently, your images in cast paper ‘play’ with exploring different forms, while your etchings possess a quality of spaces vacated, of solitude – of meditating on pure line.

Did your work evolve to take a different perspective – so that you came to believe in the sole authenticity of line ?

ZH: When I make a print, I am dealing with the proportions of the page, the border, and the margins around it. When I began working with cast paper, it freed me from that invariable, rectangular page. With paper sculptures I found the freedom to explore other shapes.

And although I have used colors in these sculptures, they are earth pigments: I use terra-rosa for brick-red, graphite for slate-grey and powdered charcoal for black. Each sculpture is monochromatic – it retains the purity of form.

GS: These forms in cast paper of the ‘80s are, if you like, interventions between earlier and later work. Your training at Hayter’s studio at Atelier 17 in Paris, from 1963-67, was to learn etching – and you were deeply inspired by Hayter. How did you turn to sculpture in cast paper?

ZH: When I returned to Delhi in 1967 and began working in my barsati/ studio, I started with woodcuts – on handmade paper. This was my first introduction to working with hand made khadi paper: the roughness and texture opened me to the possibilities of working with spatial depth. I began to emboss my prints, which were then white on white. When I visited Sanganer in Rajasthan, I saw paper being made, liquid paper pulled on screens from the vats. I realized then the potential of paper pulp as a casting medium.

But to try this I had to wait until I came to live in New York in 1976. In 1978 I took a paper making class at a paper-mill. In 1979 I was invited to teach at the New York Feminist Art Institute of New York. Because they did not have technical facilities for etching, I suggested to them that I could teach papermaking. To prepare for classes, I read a lot about paper: the history, the geography, the chemistry of paper. All this changed the way I thought and worked with paper.

GS: When you came to New York, were you influenced by certain artists?

ZH: After I arrived in New York I became part of the community of women artists. My world changed radically – as it had also in Paris. I worked on the editorial board of ‘Heresies’ for their issue on Third World Artrists. Heresies was a journal of art and politics started by a collective of women artists and the art critic Lucy Lippard Until then I had no contact with the ‘other’ America: the Hispanics, the Afro- Americans, the American Indians and other discriminated minorities. This was the beginning of a new awareness. I also co-curated a show of Third World Women Artists, Dialectics of Isolation for AIR Gallery in New York.

It is true to say that women artists have changed the definition of sculpture. If you look at the work of Eva Hesse, she never worked in the traditional materials of bronze or marble… There was also the work of Agnes Martin, and Louise Bourgeois and Nancy Graves.

I saw the work of Eva Hesse at the Guggenheim, during my first visit to New York in 1973. She was exactly my age, we belonged to different worlds, still we were inspired by the same conditions prevailing in contemporary art.

GS: There are affinities here, in exploring unconventional mediums. The images of Eva Hesse introduce also the fusion of fragility and strength. Her innovations took her far beyond her contemporaries: she used fiberglass and plastic, cord and wire and metal tubing. She made her choices in aesthetics, and before she died she had introduced a radical new approach to sculpture. There is her statement, much quoted but worth recalling:

I have learned that anything is possible. I know that
that vision or concept will come through total risk,
freedom, discipline.
I will do it.

I know you believe in discipline – your work is meticulous, attempting perfection in the finest details; and your ongoing commitment shows this. But do you also believe Zarina, in freedom – in taking risks?

ZH: I won’t be here if I did not take risks. Making a mark on a surface is a risk. In 1983, I made a book of cast paper with text, Flight Log. Each of the four pages had line of text on the overlaying page. I was writing about my life, using the metaphor of flying and the physical experience of learning to fly the glider. It also says everything that I had to say about my life at that time. This was my first work in book form. I wrote:

I tried to fly
Got caught in the thermal
Could never go back
Having lost the place to land.

That first line says everything: that I tried to fly. At least, I tried.

GS: I remember that we had looked at it when I visited you in Santa Cruz, in 1996. I marveled at its ingenuity, its economy of words where four lines and four images could say everything one has to say about life. Each page is like a haiku in its brevity. The last written line corresponds to an empty page with no image: ‘Having lost the place to land’.

These words which seem so literal speak of more than flying – of taking risks in life. The past tense is not past: it implies you tried, you are trying – as in flying – to break the barriers of time and space.

ZH: I took lessons in flying gliders in New Delhi in 1973, just before I went to Japan. Gliders can only stay in the air for twenty minutes – this limitation is the exciting part of this experience. There is a chain which connects the glider to the jeep, and at a certain point you must release this chain – it is like cutting off the umbilical cord, breaking connections. In 1974 I went to live in Japan on a Japan Foundation Foundation Fellowship. I lived in Tokyo for eight months, traveled extensively in the country, and from Japan I came to the United States.

GS: Flight Log encapsulates in four pages your aspirations, your need for adventure: your eternal peregrinations that moved you across the world. When you married Saad Hashmi in 1958, his diplomatic career took you across to Bangkok, to Paris, to Bonn, to New York. In 1974 you traveled on your own to Tokyo; you went across continents visiting Lebanon and Iraq and Turkey; you visited Krishna Reddy and Judy in Paris; and in 1975-1976 you drove cross country from New York to Los Angeles, three times. You compelled yourself to cross your own limits – to cross borders – as you have recorded in your prints.

You made a portfolio marking these destinations in Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines,1997. And later when you could not travel, you used the internet to trace the countries you had visited, titling them The Atlas of My World, 2001. In these you have inscribed the names in Urdu of the countries you had visited—this became then your personal atlas.

What interests me is that despite this great wanderlust, you have been tied – rooted – to the idea of the home, the house. I see these as two polarities of your self and your life – when you have moved from mapping the house to mapping the world; from the personal to the universal. And I am amazed as to how this evolution has come about.

ZH: It did not happen in one day; I work instinctively, one theme lead to another. It is a logical development, but it is not a premeditated journey. Here again personal and political collided. How can one ignore what is happening in the world: the injustices the violence perpetuated on innocent civilians, the wars fought over fraudulent claims. I can not join the resistance, I protest through my work. I drew the maps of cities destroyed, violated. Some of the cities I had visited, others needed to be memorialized.

Home is the center of my universe; I make a home wherever I am. My home is my hiding place, a house with four walls, sometimes with four wheels.

GS In my experience I cannot think of anyone else, from India, as deeply committed to paper in its richness and texture and flexibility. Nasreen Mohammedi was one exception. You met her in New Delhi in the late 60’s and became close friends. Where did your concern begin with exploring paper?

ZH: In the house at Aligarh I grew up surrounded by books. My father was professor of history at the AMU, we had a large collection of books at home. Even before I learned to read I loved to look at the printed words and images. This is what drew me to printmaking and the book. I see prints as part of the Book. In the Western tradition, prints were part of the book.

GS: The print does not form part of the Indian tradition though, or of Indian sensibility. It enters art production in India in the 19th century, and more in the way of popular expression. But we could say that the ‘art of the book’ was patronized and practiced at the Mughal court and with Sultanate rulers from the 15th century, if not earlier. This was a complete exercise in the royal karkhanas: from the making of paper to the calligrapher and painter to the illuminator and the book binder. Might this, the idea of the bound book or album, the muraqqa, have influenced you?

ZH: One is influenced by so many things, words, images sounds and smells. For me prints are part of the book, I see no need for prints to compete with painting on canvas. These are two different means of expression two different sensibilities.

I like working on series: the images become part of a narrative, a sequence. From 1990 to 2004, I have made fourteen portfolios. In some ways these portfolios are like albums or books, my autobiography. The House at Aligarh was the first book I made.

Then there is calligraphy: for me calligraphy is a higher form of expression then representation. As in books and in albums, I too have inscribed words in Urdu – words which are related to the image. At times I add lines of a poem from Ghalib, Bahadur Shah Zafar, or Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Sometime I put down my random thoughts or record time of the day. The words are in my own language, recalling a time, a sensibility of thought and feeling. For me, words form an indispensable part of my visual expression.

GS: Yes, these words create the ethos with which we relate to the abstract image, to reach its meaning. But there is a difference here from the printed book: your images are not illustrative of the word. They are finite, but since they define geometrical forms they do not belong to cognitive reality – they are abstractions.

ZH: My work is not about the medium – it is about a concept. I begin work with a word, not the image.

In Home is a Foreign Place, 1999, I made a list of words which were meaningful for me; and I took this list of words with me to Pakistan where a calligrapher wrote them in nastaliq script. Back in New York I developed idea-images which flowed from these words. This is a portfolio of thirty-six small prints, each in a series of six. I placed words in a sequence. In these prints I have used the forms I have worked with over the years, in a way my sign language of the line, vertical and horizontal, the diagonal, the triangle, the circle and the square. All deal with basic geometry. I regard geometry as sacred practice.

The Gallery Espace show of Home is a Foreign Place, in the year 2000 was my first show in India after an absence of 15 years.

GS: If you recall, this was the series that compelled me to write on your images, with my first article published in Art India, 2000. I had never known such intimacy built up between word and image. You mention that the words came first; then you conceived the image. For many it might be the reverse case – your conceptual approach suggests the reverence you bring to the word. And they are your own words, not quoted from a poem or a sura from the Koran..

ZH: My own writing is first introduced in the early portfolios of the House at Aligarh and House with Four Walls. These ideas evolved when I was visiting my sister Rani in Pakistan, when we shared our recurring dreams of visiting the house at Aligarh. I have constructed a shared narrative, stories of our childhood fantasies of ghosts and, snakes and the long summer afternoons. Using single words with an image to build the narrative was entirely a different experience.

GS: In Home is a Foreign Place the word/images flow ingeniously into a sequence, taking you in 36 prints from the ‘home’ to the ‘world’. In the first stanza of six, you move from the house to the door to the threshold to the entrance to the courtyard to the wall that encloses the house. But these simple structural components of the house also imply the idea of living in an enclosed space – that char-diwari, the four walls which you spoke about with Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker – to quote her, “the home within which women should stay and remain”…

ZH: I dreamed of life under the sheltering sky within the four walls. The House with Four Walls was never a prison for me.

GS: The words you chose resonate in their alliteration in the Urdu language: from subah (morning) to shafaq (dawn) to shabnam (dew). Then the flow of language / mood / image is exquisite: from sham (evening) to saee (shadow) to badal (cloud) to andhi (dust-storm) to barish (rain) and to khushboo: the fragrance which rises from the earth after the rain. And as brief is the word, so is the image chiseled. Night is intensely black, dissected by a slender horizontal line.

We reach the last stanza of six word-images without warning. How did we get from the house to the border? Home is a Foreign Place is a turning point – where you arrived precisely at the turn of the millennium.

ZH: I am not a writer; I needed to retrace my steps to places I have passed through to understand how I got here, at this place, at this point and time. I used the means available to me, a language of symbols and words. It has nothing to do with nostalgia; I have no desire to ever go back up to pick up the threads of my old life. Starting with the House at Aligarh,1990 to Letters from Home, 2004, is documentation, a diary, a personal journal.

Home is a Foreign Place (1999) was closing the book on Aligarh. So when I came back to New York, I started work on maps of cities and countries through which I have traveled. I started with maps of Delhi.

GS: Did aerial views of the city remind you of flying? In the manner of airline maps which connect different destinations, you have marked out your own journey across the world, and titled it with irony as Mapping the Dislocations, 2001.

ZH: Even on commercial flights, you look at cities at take-off and landing. You spoke of borders earlier – that this portfolio begins at Home and takes me to the Border. I drew the borders I have crossed. I was thinking of not just borders on the map but also the barriers one crosses in life – the risks one takes in crossing over to new destinies. I started with the border which has most affected my life, that is the border between India and Pakistan. This became the Dividing Line. Then I made an atlas and drew the borders which I have crossed between countries, writing the names of the countries through which I have traveled in Urdu. This is the Atlas of My World, 2001.

GS: It was Lucy Lippard who had said that women artists turn their personal vocabulary into political statement. This can be followed in your own trajectory – most specifically in your portfolio of Cities, Blotted into the Wilderness (Adrienne Rich after Ghalib), 2003. This is where you leave behind your personal borders, to engage in mapping conflicts in the world – reclaiming nine cities with their histories torn apart.

I return to that exquisite language, the poetry of words which define your images. Your spare lines that once delineated your own home have become patterns of cities and settlements – symbols of a different reality. You have embarked on journeys across continents and civilizations that you name, and others you have never known…

But the language remains the same; this brings you ‘home’ again. In Urdu you share your dreams with your sister Rani, you write your own poetry – and you share your sorrows and bereavement. In the last series of prints Letters from Home, 2004, you have returned home by mapping your memories of places over the letters written to you by your sister. This too is political as much as it is personal – it is using language as the assertion of an identity that can never be erased.

3400 words Geeti Sen, New York, November 2006.

3300 words.

We are asleep, dreaming -- suddenly shattered by despair.

But why Zarina, why does the night lead you to darkness and despair which shatters the stillness, erupting into emotions like fireworks? Why does despair remind you of the country, of the language and its loss?

ZH: ‘Despair’ (whaishat) is from a poem by Majaaz. I have heard the poem recited innumerable times and it has stayed with me. I like to acknowledge words and images in my work imprinted on my subconscious; and I can not shed their memory. The literal translation of this line will be, what am I to do with this despair in my heart. There is a connection to the country (watan) and to language (zabaan) -- it is hard to loose one’s country and language. To return to the dust (matti) of the country of birth is part of the wish of all exiles.

GS: That loss leads you Zarina, on to your journey (safar) and the road (rasta)) you took, through endless destinations (manzil) and through time (muddat) and distance (faasla) until you reach the border (hudood). For me your use of the word manzil is significant, used so often by poets, resonating with different implications… What does it mean for you?

ZH: Manzil is about the stages of the journey to self realization, as much as it is about destinations. It can mean stages, stations, levels—transcendence

A Personal Language of Geometry & Architecture

Zarina’s work in New York in the 1970s and 1980s shifted and came, as a surprise, to include this group of cast-paper sculptures. Up until about 1982 most of these were of outwardly geometric shapes, such as squares and rectangles, into which other smaller geometric shapes had been formed and arranged in patterns over flat surfaces. Although the sculptures were framed within the simplest and most iconic geometry, they struck the eye at that time with a kind of start: they were dramatic and arresting and were so original that they appeared at first to have had no background in Zarina’s earlier work.

The sculptures did, however, have a history and that history was one which traced and joined two lines of thought—about architecture and about paper—from the past. Zarina recounts, about her life, that she moved around the world and brushed up against the architecture of other places, and that as she later recast her memory of old structures and ruins, fragments of their architecture came into her imagination as a vocabulary of geometric forms.

We know from her story that in childhood Zarina wrote on slate tablets. Later, exchanging one fascination for another, she came to see that just as a slate board could be used to inscribe letters so too could the more expressive surfaces of paper be used to register the marks and images of her prints.

In Bangkok in the 1960s Zarina made woodblock prints and stone rubbings on the plant -fiber papers of Thailand. In India in the late 1960s (after Paris and study with S. W. Hayter at Atelier 17) she made prints on handmade papers which came to her through the Khadi Gram Udyog Bhawan in New Delhi. The Khadi Gram was an artisan’s collaborative founded by Gandhi to promote traditional crafts in India. Since its papers were made in a variety of manners and in several regional workshops, they offered artists the chance to test the expressive range of many different materials. Perhaps, they also forced Zarina to shape her print making ideas against some very stubborn surfaces.

Later in Japan, in 1974, Zarina studied woodblock printing and learned the technique of sizing paper. Finally, in New York, after all these chapters of study in Bangkok, Paris, India and Japan came together, she began to work, out of a long history with paper, to create this astonishing group of sculptures.

To think back to the time when the sculptures first appeared, they seemed to have been crafted from a somewhat mysterious material—one which bespoke a weighty, even brooding mass. They did not have any of the lightness of paper. In looking into their surfaces, one read from them an older language, usually associated with stone, clay or bronze; they reflected several transformations of the paper from which they were crafted.

The questions about why the sculptures came to look as they did were answered by the technique which Zarina devised for making them. (The technique, incidentally, was utterly of her own invention.) She began by pouring paper slurry as if it were molten metal into deep relief molds. When the sculpture was to be a geometric one, its mold typically had smaller geometric patterns notched into it. The paper matrix could be pressed further by hand and then set to dry. Sometimes a piece, after it had been removed from its mold, was sized with mica or metal powder and further surfaced with gold-leaf, silver-leaf or glass shards. From a look back at Zarina’s earlier paper works—mostly all prints and mostly all conceived around geometric shapes—we can see the new works as a re-configuring of the flat patterns of earlier prints into sculptural forms. What is interesting about the process is that it was accomplished altogether by hand without the use of tools or a printing press.

Geometry

Four of the sculptures in this group are formed as simple squares and meditate, I think, as does Malevich’s famous square on the purity of that shape. One of these, Fence, an indefinite minimal plain, is rimmed by a border of parallel stacked lines. In outward appearance, it is only an enclosure or perhaps a tablet. Its inner surface is quiet; but its presence does not for a moment leave the mind quiet: it strikes the eye with a welter of allusions and questions. If you ask where such an old and formal “thing” could have been before, its almost hieratic demeanor might answer that it could once have had a life in a place of learning or a scribe’s workshop.
Since the piece is so formally abstract (a square after all) it resists any specific reading of its past life. It suggests and simultaneously obscures interpretation. It prompts all manner of both historical and architectural musings to hover unanswered over its cool surface.

Two other works, Pool I and II, from 1980, relate closely to Fence. These pools are slightly smaller, perhaps less abstract, but heavier squares which enclose inner recesses. While one of them has a thick sloped border leading into its interior space, the other, Pool II, has actual steps around it which may represent the real stairs used for entering a pool if you imagine the piece lying flat. If you place it upright on a wall, however, as here, other architectural allusions intrude. The sections of a dome for instance, with graduating steps receding onto a flat surface, may come to mind, but only, perhaps, for a moment. The architecture here is not specific and whether Pool II is a fragment of stonework or a unit of imagination is not made clear.

Pool I, according to Zarina, is a simple enclosure. But her ironic minimal statement does not, except in a reductive and mathematical sort of way, say anything more about the piece than does calling it a square. To get into the language through which it gives up its meaning we have to look into the surface light playing off its color. This pool casts strange shadows and its color moves halfway from one tone to another; it can appear grey, copper, or ochre by turns. Its presence is slightly otherworldly and darker than that of the other square—as though it had been cast in the half-light of a Gothic place.

The shifting appearances of the pools reflect the subtle properties of their paper matrix. It is the technical command of the artist, however, over the material which allows her to bring the sculptures into a precise state of balance between roughness and finish. In a manner achieved over and again, she makes the work seem to have been torn from its mold, scratched and even pounded a bit—but not overly polished! To repeat a point, Zarina as a sculptor has invented a process whereby she can cast, color and surface her materials, in one breath.

To return to Pool I1 and Fence, taken together they make a point about geometry and stasis. Fence, incidentally, is the more silent of the two; but paradoxically, both works are oracular: they seem to announce in their abstract fashion something which can be heard as admonitory or even sacred. Though modernist and minimal, their language is bound within a tight square. Geometry creates a quite reserve which is matched by color:
the flat grey of Fence and the more broken burnt-umber of Pool I1,
so beautifully inflected with gold, does not move so much on the surface as it does in Pool I. This is important to note, perhaps, because the poetry of these two squares is ceremonious and still.

The last of the four squares, Homecoming, from 1981 encodes a shift in Zarina’s artistic language relative to architecture. This piece is again a perfect square; it is again a serene flat space lined by a border. What is different about it is that its border is a clearly discernible row of arches—broken and ruined arches, to be sure—but arches, nevertheless. Whether the arches are to be read as Moorish or perhaps Romanesque is not clear. But what is certain is that the depiction of a specific architectural element moves this artwork out of its pictorial abstraction and gives it a history.

We know from a photograph that these arches encode a personal memory for Zarina: they refer specifically to the arches in the courtyard of the house at Aligarh. While we did not know beforehand about the reference to home in this work, except in its title, we did see all along that it took our eye along lines of broken arcades—tracing a square which remained as ever cool, silent and melancholy. The squares are formal and abstract: they hold and yet restrain a modernist habit of mind of looking into art as though it were only fragmented interior, shattered memory and broken bits of architecture.

To emphasize this paradoxical point in another way, the squares speak in an annunciatory voice and they also remain pensive and silent. Their argument is that while their surfaces cast allusions, premonitions and emotional prophesies, they also project countervailing impulses to stillness within their abstract lines. While the works may allude to the architectural life of other places, their language can be restrained within the most restrictive geometry. It is as though this language takes up refuge in a void and frames concealments within lines and barriers. One never quite knows whether what is hidden within is mathematical or in some larger sense mystical.

Several rectangular entablatures from 1979-1981 are structurally similar to the squares. Outwardly, they develop straight-line shapes and arrange them over a grid or in a line. One work in particular, Memory of Bangkok, sets out a strict arrangement of lamp niches in identical rows. The niches are lined with “gold” leaf. This gold reflects out of the well of the deep relief enclosures when light passes over its surface at different times of day. The piece is formally minimal. It is a rectangle with no ornamentation beyond gold-bronze color and a surface indented only by straight-line shapes.

Despite its simple forms, Memory of Bangkok has great force in its presence. Around its rough edges float musings about archaeological past time: this is an artifact of a contemplative culture. Though the piece never tells us what it is, it hints at a philosophical purpose: perhaps it suggests a place for encoding law or exhorting to ritual. Perhaps its ideas, having been set down only after long thought, express only a mystery.

During the period of these sculptures, Zarina continued to make prints as before. On occasion she took over the geometric shapes from sculpture and used them to make an etching. Memory of Bangkok, for instance, gave rise to One Morning the City was Golden. The print is quieter than its sculptural prototype—more delicate and more refined—a different order of work. Another sculpture, Wall, a clay-earth labyrinth from 1982 produced the impulse for another etching, Golden Route, on dark grey handmade paper— printed only with a slight delicate tracing of gold-powder. Both these prints are ghostly, like mere shadows of thought. They are beautiful in the extreme; but they are nothing at all like their bold and gritty sculptural antecedents.

Beyond Geometry

The New York sculptures begin to move beyond strict geometric shapes in the 1980s and start to appear more loosely formed, out of curved or jagged irregularities. One shape is a spiral; three others are wheels. One is a rounded notched seed. Some have sharp spikes. One is a book.

Each of these pieces stands to itself and somewhat aside from the specific formalities of squares and rectangles. They begin to have fractured surfaces but all of them have “at their backs” some structural allegiance to geometric shapes. Triangles are seen inside the shapes of ten or so of these later works. Lotus, Twisted House, Roofs, and Shelter are all inhabited by triangles. There are also other fractured patterns which break up the surface of two of the rounded works. Lotus is a case in point: it is all geometry; it is just that its structure has moved beyond the flat plain surface.

The same broken geometry is seen in Twisted House. This wheel, incidentally, is such an impressive work—full of high ceremony and heraldic greeting. One imagines its placement in the tokonoma of a great, generous and learned house—all shining and turning in its silver light—its triangular plains circling about a deconstructed, modernist square center.

After a certain time Zarina’s sculptures became altogether more rounded and jagged. In some instances, they took on organic curves and remembered their geometry only within lines and notches. They began to move into new shapes and more somber meanings.

These sculptures continue to surprise us today; they continue to provoke and unnerve us slightly. As artworks, they retain the unique power of being able to turn our mind away from its focus on their beauty into a deeper perhaps darker, grasp of their melancholy and sense of loss.

Robert Kimbril

November 2006