Whispered Continuum Smriti Dixit

In Whispered Continuum, Smriti Dixit draws inspiration from the natural landscape and coastal flora near her home in suburban Mumbai, where every creeper, palm, and ripple becomes a metaphor for resilience and transition. Through her sculptural installations rendered in a largely monochromatic palette with vivid reds, she reimagines the quiet persistence of nature and its cycles of growth, decay, and renewal. Evolving since 1995, her practice of coiling, weaving, and stitching fabric and found materials has been both meditative and transformative. This body of work marks her return to Delhi after two decades, reaffirming her pioneering engagement with textile as a medium and her reflection on the continuity between material, memory, and emotion. She delves into her relationship with Bombay, which has influenced much of her work, and shares her perspective on finding beauty in the ordinary.
 
Tell us about the influence of Bombay in your work. What is your relationship with the city?
Mumbai has been my home for a long time now. Houses in Mumbai are very small in size, I believe, it is difficult to store not only things or artworks, but even your views and thoughts for a prolonged period. The only way forward is to recycle and somewhere I feel that has seeped into my artistic practice. My visual language is influenced by the nature and my surroundings. Even when I step out into the city, every small interaction finds a way into my art.
 
How do you find beauty in the ordinary and how has it shaped your artistic ethos?
I think my work is a celebration of the beauty of the ordinary. I understand how rare it is to be ordinary today. In ordinary beauty, the unconscious is used very consciously. I like to describe my work as an array of different wavelengths that capture the essence of germination.

Tell us about your choice as red as the predominant hue through your works.
Red is such a colour which expresses life, death, happiness, sadness, love and violence with equal intensity. I draw on this essence of the colour using a predominantly monochromatic palette in many of my works, the reds, the vermillion and black, it reflects all these emotions that the viewer perceives about my work.
 
What draws you towards art that emphasises on recycling?
My survival instinct actually drew me towards recycling. As I said, it was situational, the paucity of space actually emphasized on the value of recycling for me. And my art was born out of this instinct. All my works are the scenes around me, the sights I collide with daily or rather, the memories of those scenes. They are attempts to see again what has been seen before so the undercurrent of recycling thoughts and perceptions is very central to my practice. It is an effort to let cloth simply be cloth, a price tag simply be a price tag, a smell to simply be a smell, and through these possibilities, to reveal what I have seen.

What is one rule you’d break for your art?
I remember while I was a student in Baroda, during still life study, all the easels were faced towards the object being captured, however, my easel always faced towards the window. I did not break any rules per se but I believe, for art, there are no rules. It has to be visually evocative for the artist and the viewer.
 
What do you hope for viewers to take away from the exhibition?
Cloth is the first thing that humans interact with, be it the cloth in which newborn life is wrapped in or new clothes, the essence of cloth is very central to human existence. So, I hope that the viewers witness the re-imagination of this material in my body of work being presented at Art Alive.

What’re you working on next?
I intend to expand this series of work. Lately, I have been observing nature and studying its quiet intricacies with great precision. The way a fish slithers through the pond, the way birds change direction while flying, the softness of the wind gently touching and ruffling the leaves of a tree, all this really intrigues me. This is going to show in my future body of work.

Date 3-12-2025