I lost while tracing the grey

Graphite Drawing on Paper

This is an ongoing (2021 onwards) transdisciplinary research project investigating the Suri-Pathra Road corridor in Birbhum, West Bengal—a site in constant flux where historical administrative vectors, forest stretches and accelerating concrete enclosures intersect. Rooted in an artistic methodology that treats the artist’s body as a somatic sensor, the project explores how environmental disturbances—agricultural stubble burning, radiant ground heat and forest fragmentation—are absorbed through direct physical encounter and transduced into a tactile visual archive.

mind map

The research operates across three nested scales

• At the macro scale, the project contextualises the Suri-Pathra corridor within a historical trajectory of state and colonial spatial organisation (1820, 1876), stretching toward the Jharkhand border as a buffer zone and administrative nexus.

• At the meso scale, the road functions as a living, mutating organism—a site where infrastructural expansion steadily encroaches upon transitional spaces, open fields and forest boundaries.

• At the micro scale, the inquiry anchors itself at Site-1, a site of immediate sensory encounter. Here, outer environmental phenomena (external registers) undergo a somatic translation into inner psychological states (internal registers).

  
  

These internal registers directly drive the project's material translation. By converting environmental residue into Drawings and Paintings, the practice employs graphite drawing as a tactile witness and anti-amnesiac recording, while oil painting renders

spatial uneasiness and fragmented land forms.

The project introduces a stress-testing simulation framework to interrogate the limits of place and memory: What if the process of mutation accelerates beyond human recording capacity? What if the"grey" overshadows the place entirely, erasing all visual landmarks into total spatial amnesia? What if a road does not scar the way skin scars, but simply stops being a road?

This project functions as an anti-amnesiac archive against spatial erasure. Rather than treating the site as a passive background for infrastructure, the research reveals how place survives its own disturbances—not by resisting, but by carrying its marks as a second, truer shape.

Expected Outcomes & Deliverables

• Field Notebooks & Audio-Visual Logs: Primary research materials capturing sensory recordings.

• Drawings on Paper: A series of graphite drawings from Site-1.

• Oil Paintings on Canvas: A series mapping and reflecting spatial alienation, unstable topographies and expanding concrete boundaries.

• Spatial Installation: An exhibition layout that organises drawings, paintings, sound and site logs.