Bharti Kher Weather painting: The sun splitting stones 2023–4 Oil paint on linen 183 × 305 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth. Photo: Jeetin Sharma
Bharti Kher’s painting opens up a feeling I did not expect to have.
Can I write from this feeling in a notebook on the bench nearby, or at a remove?
A volatile note that disperses as it’s being written.
A note written in invisible ink, ink that becomes visible when held up to the light, a kind of crushed gold matter scored on the constituent material, the paper, so that what you’re looking at is a grid of uneven, cream-white lines.
A pressure before appearance, I think, looking at Bharti Kher’s painting in England, where I live, and where the work is being exhibited.
Descendancy is not inert.
The grid is bleached out, radiant, displaced to the upper right-hand corner of the painting.
Perhaps the image articulates (begins to speak), or is embossed in some way, so that it radiates across time, a piercing light, red curtains with the sun coming through, blowing back and forth, almost filling the room before being sucked back towards the windows.
Perhaps poetry makes traumatic images more acute.
Perhaps poetry is not the right place to do this thinking.
Write a sentence on the windowsill of the art museum with your fingertip, or lightly, in pencil, a criminal act in some contexts.
A volatile note.
Last night, I dreamed of an explosion, horses, a friend from long ago, a harbour at night. My friend leaped into the water, and I could hear him laughing, exhorting me to leap. But in the dream, there was also an explosion. A girl’s face was wiped clean of flesh. Of flesh. Of flesh. I put my hand to my own face in the dream.
No, I am not writing that.
A volatile note might be a translation, transcribed from the notebook that I’m trying to think in, with or near the sun splitting stones.
A volatile note: ‘a brief record of facts.’
Yes, this year, we read Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes in the garden, when the world was too much to bear.
Can a volatile note be a caption?
I select the lilac pencil and annotate the painting as lightly as possible, next to a sketch of winter blossoming viburnum. This writing does not share a context with the painting, just as the painting performs titration as the intense contrast between symbols and – hue?
Crumple then discard these notes to write a poem.
A poem is volatile, if it’s never written down.
Dear Bharti Kher, hi.
This poem is for you.
TATE ST IVES
Bharti Kher’s Weather Painting: The sun splitting stones is included in a solo display of her work until 5 May.
Bhanu Kapil is a poet who lives in Cambridge. Her 2020 collection How to Wash a Heart won the T.S. Eliot Prize.
