Ruma Choudhury, a contemporary artist and independent researcher based in Santiniketan, India, hails from Birbhum, the land of red soil – and as a result, has always been surrounded by and inspired deeply by nature. Her artistic practice involves collecting and documenting the minute details of nature which may or may not be tangible or visible in everyday life. She gathers natural materials which are generally considered waste – natural fibres discarded after human use, rain water, tree bark, stones, skin of insects and animals, nests, dry flowers, and so on – and creates her works using the various possibilities this collected matter provides. She resonates the personal memories of loss in her life with this process of collecting and documenting lost identities.
Choudhury has adopted nature as her source to narrate how it is getting depleted as a result of human greed. She then constructs these archives of found materials into an abstract narration – thus communicating and responding to them. Having studied Painting at Kala Bhavan, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, Ruma Choudhury has replaced industrially-made paper with organic paper that she makes herself, in her works. Paper, for her, is not only a medium on which she creates; but also a work of art itself.
