Madi Acharya-Baskerville’s work explores the narrative behind found or discarded objects. Much of her work begins by going for walk and collecting discarded fragments from people’s lives. She explores what these artefacts mean to her, in relation to her own experience of migration and exile. There is an analogy between discarded materials and the dislocation that individuals may feel when they are exiled from their place of origin. This particular work was created for the exhibition ‘Sanctuary’ at the National Museum of Kenya, Nairobi. The inside of a home is a place of refuge, a ‘sanctuary’ where books and journals are often found. She came across a washed-up copy of the journal ‘National Geographic’, most of the pages had disintegrated with only parts of photographs and text being visible. She took this object as a starting point to explore how fragments of found images can relate to a more personal narrative. The remaining individual pages became a study of loss of information fused with poetic imagery from Indian textiles, text and traces of life in rural communities.
|