The Goan: You began first with painting and then shifted to ceramics in 2010. What brought about this change?
Savia Mahajan: I was trained as a painter and a print-maker. Post college, I got engaged in the form of painting for over 10 years, developing a distinct style of richly coloured visuals, decorated with impasto dots. I drew inspiration from nature, fantasy and symbolisms of indigenous cultures. Eventually my meticulous methods and the final results felt mundane and I began feeling a disconnection with my practice as a painter. I found myself in a dangerous and beautiful situation. From there on my journey of curiosity began. I was in search of a new material, an intimacy with which I could express myself. I wanted all that was resident in me to have a resonance in my practice, coming from a deeper place of existential inquiries of birth, death, rebirth and its thresholds. I found clay, to me it is mass; an animistic element. It shares the very same paradoxical qualities I was looking for, of strength and fragility, creation and destruction.
TG: What is it about fossils that fascinates you?
SM: Fossils fascinate me a lot - for the obvious reasons that they were once species rising, transmuting and thriving. But beyond the mere fascination, fossils speak of the profound urge of life to leave a trace, to be remembered, to state ‘I was here’. it is an appeal against forgetting, embedding oneself in times memory.
TG: Life and Death - and that which is in between or beyond. Your search is unending. What do you want to know and explore?
SM: I chose to address the age-old, probably never-to-be-answered, question of whether there exists anything other than the body which survives death and dissolution, not to seek ready answers but to temper the arrogance that stems from the taken-for-grantedness of the material world. What really is left behind? Is life ephemeral or eternal? All such metaphysical explorations preoccupy me.
TG: Why does the ‘liminal space’ haunt you so often?
SM: The in-between cannot be ignored: one has to learn to dig into these interstices, into the processes that interpolate between life and death. This is the exploration of the liminal, the otherwise ignored junctions between the polar opposites that we see this world as being made of.
TG: And why gold embedded into the earth? What does that mean?
SM: The use of gold in the work was vital as the process meant literally exhuming and excavating and gold as a metal is known to have sank into the core of the earth when earth was in its molten state but it surfaced to the mantle after multiple impacts, disintegration and pounding four billion years ago. The oozing out of the gold in the ‘Exhume’ work draws its detail from that phenomenon.
