Artists usually do drawings using brush and ink on paper, but here is an artist who uses a primitive memo app to express ideas or feelings. ‘Alexa! Win this War!,’ a collection of 88 digital drawings, by Radha Gomathy plays out like pages from an unbound manuscript of a graphic novel about a tyrant’s violent and degrading yet comical fantasies of control and domination with a virtual digital assistant. Seen individually, and read with tiny fragments of the accompanying text, they configure violent, angst-ridden, remorseful, and ecstatic moments from the life of a couple.
The work is currently being exhibited at Shed ‘D’ of the Kerala State Coir Corporation in Alappuzha, one of the venues of Lokame Tharavadu, a contemporary art exhibition curated by Bose Krishnamachari. All the drawings in the assemblage were done by Ms. Gomathy using the memo app that she had downloaded in 2018 but became her companion in 2020 during the COVID-19-induced lockdown.
Phone as a studio
For an artist like her, without a studio, the phone turns every space into one, says Ms. Gomathy. The drawings happened one by one, reflecting the micro-histories of the day, her thoughts, and interactions. “I never had a plan. It just happened that way. The only thing was to let go. When you get a straw, you hold on to it and let it pull you, and then everything else falls into place,” she says.
Ms. Gomathy writes in her concept note: “Increasingly, art for me is a deft fusion of sight and touch-like a blind woman seeing her beloved one with her fingers. It offers the same sense of security and loving response that clay offers me when I sculpt.”
Range of media
A poet, she works in a range of media, including video, painting, writing, performance, and sculpture. She uses a mix of natural and other materials and most of her art is layered and conceptual – mythopoeic in nature and figurative in approach.
