MANISHA PAREKH

As a painting student in the 1980s, Parekh experienced the tutelage of Nasreen Mohamedi at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and thereafter held close the importance of honouring the expressive qualities of any material. Ember’s mutable forms, which traverse works on paper and sculpture, are shaped by fluctuating encounters with temperature, pressure, and time. Parekh’s sensorial worldmaking is a result of deep deliberation – a practice of slow making to which Parekh has long remained committed. As art historian Rakhee Balaram notes, ‘the artist pays careful and painstaking attention to phrasing and lyricism in the arrangement of her works, but avoids preciousness through rigorous editing and an understanding of sequence and form’.

Viscous brushstrokes leap and coalesce as they invigorate the paper’s surface in the series Fields of Hibiscus (2026). These radiant watercolours are animated by buoyant motions that swell and fall – gestures that nod to the raga as one of Parekh’s central creative influences. In Fields of Hibiscus 1 (2026), webs of intertwining crimson and maroon ink strokes, occasionally caressed by swathes of magenta, are pierced by a jolt of saffron yellow. Hovering over the large pulsating knot is a single dotted thread reminiscent of the microscopic insect traces that have influenced installation works such as Shadow Garden (2013). Accumulating and dispersing, these undulating specks embody a rhythmic score emanating directly from the land.

Elements of the corporeal are evoked in Fields of Hibiscus 3 (2026) as ribbons of blood red materialise as throbbing arteries, punctuated by fine white fibres. As pools of ink appear, Parekh transforms them into temporary architectures held in place by fragile lattices. Despite the weighty presence of the central interlocking forms, Parekh maintains a compositional equilibrium as effervescent sprays of paint drift across its surface and provide moments of brief release. Here, she adds a vibrational layer to her paper works as the incidental paint flecks create a textural rupture we can almost feel and hear. The oscillation between fast and slow mark-making that is central to the Fields of Hibiscus series echoes how writer Amit Chaudhuri describes a raga as a structure that ‘is not a self-enclosed composition; it’s an unfolding’.

Parekh’s enlivened surfaces are explored more haptically in the triptych The Red (2024). Lengths of raw red silk are carefully teased through drilled holes in handmade paper before they are tied into knots to settle into place. By varying both tightness and distance between them, the protrusions sit like germinating seeds rippling outwards to evolve and accumulate into new landmasses that immediately sink back into the earth. Parekh delights in structural play – as the knots proliferate, she spaces them out generously. Here, gaps behave like rests in a dense musical composition. As the shapes dissolve and resurface, The Red recalls Parekh’s interest in ‘extremes of experience, the body and its inside, the world within and the world without’.

Rising from the ground is the sculptural installation Ember Breathes Alone (2026), which comprises twelve rhizomatic metallic forms. This group of perforated copper sheets rests precariously on delicate stands that cast shadows across the floor, transforming the work into a sculptural extension of Parekh’s drawing practice. She continues to meld sculptural and drawing-based modalities by embracing the embodied process that is present in the contorted and heavily patinated finish of the copper’s surface – a raw expression of the collaboration between the artist and other artisans to produce the work. Artist and poet Etel Adnan once noted that water’s iridescence is language. In the same vein, the incandescence of copper communicates a record of each maker’s touch. Fragmented like broken pieces of the earth’s crust, audiences are encouraged to perambulate the sculptures, paying close attention to what emerges between them.

When describing the experience of making this new body of work, Parekh explained that the creative process enabled her to take flight. Each composition revels in a liberating choreography that encourages our own senses of sight and imagination to share in the same movement. In Ember, Parekh continues to develop a formal language that is igneous; it continuously cools and reheats as it renders the boundaries between her chosen materials porous. Embers contain a life force that can never be fully lost. Resting dormant while casting a gentle glow, they gather strength to re-ignite once more.

Text by Amrita Dhallu, 2026. Courtesy Jhaveri Contemporary