A talk with Ipshita Maitra: At Home, In Exile

During this episode, we speak to Ipshita Maitra, a lens-based artist from India who works across various forms of mixed media and collage.

We discuss Ipshita's "At Home, In Exile" series, captured in black and white photography. We also hear Ipshita's views on the artist's relationship with their practice, reaching the spiritual through the physical, being a vessel, influences, and philosophies, and further, pushing the medium - experimentation and play.

At Home, In Exile - Ipshita states:

"A deep silence penetrates this body of work that marks the artist's time in a self-willed form of exile. The everyday, marked by a transcendental quality transforms into a labyrinth, where one is drawn into the inner intimacy of memory, of a time lived, forgotten and evoked (again)

Creation assumes a multidimensionality, planes between real and imagined, manifest and un manifest collapse

A terrain of wilderness that exists within is unleashed It is ritualized by the aspect of coming 'home' Standing on known unknown ground

Within the wanderings buried archetypes explode ...

The unconscious recesses of the psyche, play out as narratives of mystery and magic. Time assumes a suspension devoid of the linearity of movement, sometimes a vibration-less state, sometimes fragile, and dear clutching at fragments of memory. In the abyss of isolation, the self becomes the observer and the observed.

Layers of the collective unconscious and the ego/personal unconscious come together in an almost Jungian synchronicity where one wonders within a repository of symbols trying to draw meaning from absurdity. Trying to draw form from ether, trying to erase, trying to reconstruct. The work encapsulates the passage from alienation to reconnaissance, the flowering of the consciousness through a certain remembrance / smaran of repetitive movement."

This is an enlightening talk. When I ask Ipshita about what she might share with her younger self or to those in the thick of creativity, she responded: "It's important to follow your gut or your intuition. And to take that journey into yourself; because that is where all the magic begins. Also, I would say, silence is a discipline -- but not too much. And to younger artists - some amount of silient times for your self -where you provide space to not think, or be overwhelmed or even bogged down. The more one dwells in that space the more things come to you. Finally, learn to be the vessel and the receiver, and to be present in the moment."

Listen in and hear Ipshita's story, she has so much to share.