- Artist
- Zarina Hashmi 1937–2020
- Medium
- Cast paper
- Dimensions
- Object: 550 × 550 × 67 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased with funds provided by the South Asia Acquisitions Committee 2013
- Reference
- T13730
Summary
Pool I (Terracotta) 1980 is one of a group of wall-based sculptures, each made from paper pulp that has been moulded and shaped by the artist. The other works owned by Tate in this series are I Whispered to the Earth 1979 (Tate T13727), Wall II 1979 (Tate T13728) and Fence 1980 (Tate T13729). This particular work is square in format and has a raised border around the outside, with a recessed central area that is also square in shape. It is a brick-red colour, a tone achieved by applying terra rossa – a type of red clay soil – to the surface of the paper pulp. The surface is stippled with the brick-red colour but is otherwise smooth, without the indentations that characterise the other works in this series.
Zarina Hashmi was born in India but left her home country in 1958, living in various places across the world before settling permanently in New York in 1975. She is primarily known as a printmaker, having trained under the renowned English painter and printmaker S.W. Hayter (1901–1988) at Atelier 17 in Paris in 1963–7. Her work shows a deep and longstanding engagement with books and paper that is rooted in her father’s job as a history professor, his love of storytelling and Hashmi’s experience of growing up in a house filled with books. Hashmi’s paper pulp sculptures, including Pool I (Terracotta), were made in New York in 1979–80, and were fabricated using a technique she had developed following her return to India from Paris in 1967. At this time, Hashmi had begun working with handmade paper and made a trip to Sanganer, a small village near to Jaipur where paper is made using sixteenth-century production methods. Having witnessed the paper’s production and seen the material in its liquid form – being pulled out of large vats and spread across screens – Hashmi realised its potential as a casting medium. She began to produce deep relief moulds of her own, into which pulped paper was poured, pressed by hand and left to dry.
In 1979 – the year she began the sculptural series that includes Pool I (Terracotta) – Hashmi taught papermaking classes at the Feminist Art Institute of New York, for which she researched the history, geography and chemistry of paper. However her interest in the material goes beyond its cultural importance and its formal properties: Hashmi considers paper to be a substance with a life and character of its own, and has likened it to skin, stating that ‘it can be stained, pierced and moulded and it still has the capability of breathing and aging. It has a fragility and resilience that lasts through time.’ (Quoted in S. Kalidas, ‘Radiant Transits of Zarina Hashmi’, The Hindu, 5 February 2011, http://www.thehindu.com/arts/magazine/article1159045.ece, accessed August 2012.)
Since her departure from India in 1958 with her husband Saad Hashmi, a military officer engaged in international diplomacy, the artist has moved frequently between cities, countries and continents. Immediately after her departure, her family was required to relocate due to the partition of India and Pakistan, moving from Delhi in India to Karachi in Pakistan, resulting in the loss of the family home. As a consequence, themes of the house and home play an important part in Hashmi’s work. Hashmi has said: ‘Home is the centre of my universe; I make a home wherever I am.’ (Zarina Hashmi, ‘A Conversation with Zarina in New York with Geeti Sen’, in Gallery Espace 2006, p.13.)
Despite its apparent abstraction, the natural materials used to make Pool 1 (Terracotta) – as well as its title – suggest a connection with naturally occurring pools that come about through rock formation. The title and the work’s geometric shape may also make reference to the structural elements of the home and its facilities and boundaries, as is seen in the other works owned by Tate in this series. Furthermore, Hashmi conjures up lived experience through the repetition involved in the production process itself, a working method that has been described by historian Finbarr Barry Flood as a ‘performance of memory’ (Finbarr Barry Flood, ‘Memory in Material and Light’, in Galerie Jaeger Bucher 2011, p.15).
Further reading
Zarina: Paper Houses, exhibition catalogue, Gallery Espace, New Delhi 2007, reproduced p.43.
Zarina Hashmi: Noor, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Jaeger Bucher, Paris 2011.
Allegra Pesenti, Zarina: Paper Like Skin, Los Angeles 2011.
Hannah Dewar
August 2012
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