The two watercolours I sent are centered around work tables and work rooms, and more broadly, rooms themselves and how people shape them, use them. I first saw Dhruvi's work while I was a student at St Xavier's. It was perhaps 2005 or 2006 and she had an exhibition at chemould, when it was in Kala Ghoda. I saw it on accident, because I was curious about what was upstairs at Jehangir. My first memories of her work are: women, women in kalamkari or other handprinted/handloom textiles, layers of pigment separated by what looked to me like mylar, women thinking and their thoughts being visible in bubbles, women with plants in their backpacks that gave them air. Dhruvi was thinking about our environment, about motherhood, about self, and style, and pattern, and I was ecstatic to see this. About 7 years later I worked as her studio assistant, sewing fabric tear drops and parts of what would later become a bed. While working side by side with her, I would listen to her and ask her many questions. One of the things she told me was how her late husband would say that everything (perhaps in a marriage) happens on the bed. This has stayed with me, now almost ten years later. In my own life, I spend little time in bed but do spend many hours on a table, working there, eating there, writing there. I rarely use my studio space. There's something about a worktable within the home that invites overlaps between domestic duties and creative tasks (sometimes they are the same thing). In looking once again at the table, at what it supports in an imaginary glazing room where tiles are being made, and what it holds once the artist goes home, and is by her own dining table, I'm thinking about Dhruvi and her bed/s or the strange way in which designed objects become gateways to unique emotional experiences.

In these paintings I've also tried to leave behind some of my obsessive tendencies towards detailed patterning, and painting only that which can happen in real life too. I have tried to work more intuitively, placing marks that feel good that rather images that make complete sense.