“I work with paper, not on paper.” The Bengaluru-based visual artist Ravikumar Kashi corrects me gently during our conversation about his solo show We don’t end at our edges (2025) at Museum of Art & Photography (MAP). It’s not the first time that I have noticed the wry smile that naturally lights up his eyes whenever he speaks about his practice, and especially, when he explores his connection with “material.” Perhaps the idea is best represented in the literary arts by the subtle distinction between writing about a subject, and writing into a subject. Given his background in literature, he nods as I share this thought, acknowledging that artists tend to think of their creative process as a sensitive collaboration — a relationship — with the “medium” as if it were a living, breathing entity. 

Kashi’s series of paper objects, which were displayed at the exhibition, makes use of the Kannada script, at times readable but mostly illegible. The ‘words’ or alphabets are written in the “pulpy paint” of paper, created from the artist’s nozzle brush, forming elusive lattices that gesture towards shapes without ever becoming complete. The surface of language itself becomes the form of the work, transforming “neutral” skin into floating figures, sculptural objects. Sheets of many-hued tactile material evoke the fragility of paper, even as they go beyond it. Even as the objects shape themselves around the ephemerality of language, their affective force lies in the ways that they invoke abstract and familiar forms without really closing the loop of comprehensibility. Kashi describes this “opening” of matter into the conceptual plane through the notion of “incomplete signals” that merely “suggest,” without ever being truly “revealing.” 

The feeling of being enveloped by these sculptural forms was carefully curated at the exhibition by alternating emphases of shadow and light, which made the artworks glimmer and dance. Paper, otherwise an everyday object, transformed into a metaphor for the ways in which we relate with each other and the world, through the porous membrane of language. The works inhabit the liminal space between material, memory and meaning.

From Surface to Object, Strength to Vulnerability

Kashi’s practice is a hybrid one, spread across multiple interconnected domains including painting, printmaking, paper-making, writing, and even poetry. These different disciplines find material space in his studio – that he calls “his lab.” 

The paraphernalia of the “artist’s workshop” is all there  — shelves overflowing with tools of various shapes and sizes, incomplete artworks, and artists’ books. In Kashi’s studio some sculptural projects can lie abandoned for years, only to be picked up years later and repurposed into something else. Very often, young art students lurk in the studio, peering through Kashi’s notebooks filled with notes and drawings. His diaries, preserved from as long as 30 years ago, sometimes contain stray obscure scrawls, and cryptic turns of phrase that are reinvented every time they are revisited. He is a collector of both material and ideas. Any interface that allows him to record his thoughts and feelings, in written or visual forms, becomes central to his practice. 

He is generous with this evolving archive (enhanced in the last 10-15 years, thanks to digitisation). This allows students, friends, colleagues, and visitors to his studio to trace the imprints of his various projects and epistemic fascinations through the years. His lab is also a classroom. Young learners are often participant-observers involved in live demonstrations that emerge organically from his ongoing projects.

For Kashi, pedagogy brings together the various strands of his practice. Nothing exemplifies this more than a story he shares with me, about a breakthrough that came to him during a paper-making workshop. He had been exploring various ways of transforming paper into figurations, by making sheets through existing, conventional methods, and then moulding them. This earlier method of working relied on the “strength” of the paper, made from a variety of pulped raw materials. But this method has been discarded for a new one in the last two years because of an epiphany that struck while experimenting with paper pulp; a method that privileges “vulnerability” over strength. 

The moment is clearly etched in his mind – he even shares the exact month of the breakthrough: June 2023. He’d been trying for some time to achieve a particular consistency in the paper pulp, and a change in the delivery format onto the surface. During the workshop, while trying to resolve a difficulty that a student was having, he altered the viscosity of the pulp. While this didn’t solve the student’s problem – something clicked in his mind when he noticed the way in which the pulp was oozing out (variously described by him as “squishy”, “dosa batter” “sauce”), and how it seamlessly harmonised with the method of delivery that he had been trying to perfect – through a nozzle “brush.” That evening, after the workshop, he said to himself, “This is working.” 

The anecdote reaffirms  the notion of the beautiful mistake in Kashi’s quiet, creative process. It also points to an unromanticised view of epiphanies – implying that inspiration doesn’t strike suddenly, or in some supernatural haze. In fact, perceived retrospectively in Kashi’s case, the “eureka moment” is actually a serendipitous crystallisation of years and years of consistent, deep engagement with paper as a medium. 

Kashi’s tryst with paper started in 2001, when he received the Charles Wallace India Trust Grant to study handmade papermaking under artist and printmaker Jackie Parry, at the Glasgow School of Art. In 2009, he deepened his engagement with the medium during a three-week hanji papermaking residency in Jang Ji Bang, South Korea, supported by the InKo Centre, Chennai. Since then, paper has become an intrinsic (and signature) part of his oeuvre.  He also began incorporating handmade papers using diverse fibres such as cotton and banana, in addition to using hanji (also called rice paper) and paper made from the Daphne shrub (also known as lokta paper or Nepali kagaj). 

There are only a handful of other artists in the country who experiment with paper-making as part of their practice, all of whom he knows and follows. These include artists who were also taught by Jackie Parry, such as Dattatrey Apte, Anup Chakravarthy, Archana Hande, and Shantamani M. Then, there is Sharmi Chowdhury and Sudeepta Das, who went to South Korea to learn from the hanji papermaking tradition. 

Understandably, I am curious about whether Kashi’s technique with the nozzle brush — which in turn led to his dramatic methodological shift — had impacted other artists working with paper. Or, if his discovery was actually, what is now referred to in popular culture as, “a moment of inception.” Had he been subtly imprinted with the thought only after he was exposed to someone else’s work? Diplomatically, I ask Kashi whether he is the only one who has perfected “this tareeka,” this particular form that was rendered creatively in the works for We don’t end at our edges. He deftly evades the question. 

But, I have my answer. 

Whether Kashi is the first to have arrived at this way of conceiving the world through paper, is immaterial. The artworks featured in the exhibition adhere to a formal consistency, holding together as a tight “series.” But there are other works that have resulted from subtle transformations in the journey whose destination was this exhibition. Some of the works (all created between 2023-24) include various permutations of this process — of semi-liquid pulp being pushed out of the nozzle — such as Visceral Paths-2 (2024), Book of Erasures (2023), and Echoes of loss: Remnants of a Mother Tongue (2024).

Kashi does indicate that  the methodological shift had opened up a world of possibilities for him — one cannot describe the works in We don’t end at our edges as painted, drawn, or even sculpted. They speak to all these domains at once, suggesting a more hybrid, and free association with “making”. It is this material innovation that viscerally provokes those who interact with the artwork to question the very nature of relationships, and the configuration of the body within the matrix of interconnectedness — a body whose primary method of connection is through language.

A Tactile Economy

In our conversations, Kashi returns again and again to the theme of the “vulnerable body”. The contrast between the “strength” of older paper works as compared to the vulnerability of works that defined his repertoire from 2023 onwards is apparent in the comparison of two artworks, which interact with the body “as frame.”

More, some more was created in 2015 — the “frame” of the crisp shirt, representative of the body, is obvious. Then, there is Work 1 (2023) — what comes to mind is the fragile, decaying “frame” of an emaciated torso. But the fragility and vulnerability that Work 1 evokes also lends itself to multiple interpretations. “An object might look like a human body, or a bird, or a map, but not really. The viewer is invited to interpret each work according to their own responses and experiences. The meaning is not important. How does it make you feel?” asked the companion film piece shown at the exhibition.

This discursive thread, and the “feel” of the artworks, reminds me of an utterance by the philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes in his book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977): “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. [emphasis mine] My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is “I desire you,” and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself).”

Interestingly, this entry in A Lover’s Discourse is structured as an amorous dictionary of “fragments” and filed under the title of “talking,” indicating that while language is about communication, its core emotional current is fashioned by this “skin” of desire, evoking the tactile, not the intangible. Much like the Barthesian ideal of language as desire, Kashi’s haptic forms extend towards us with their linguistic fingers, composed of poetic gibberish. They urge us into a realm in which we don’t require meaning to communicate – only sensation and the shared dream of human experience. 

The lexical shapes of the typeface used in the artwork, along with the abstract forms they make, viscerally embody the Barthesian vision presented in the essay Death of the Author (1967), which refers to text as “a tissue of citations.” No single meaning emerged from the paper figures that shrouded and flared in the “space of many dimensions…, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture…” [emphasis mine].

Kashi’s paper-objects become particularly significant in a fraught contemporary social and cultural environment that seeks to muzzle speech, force people into homogenised and essentialised identities through the politics of language and statehood. In the era of “one nation, one language,” Kashi’s visionary abstractions cleave to an ideal that reimagines selfhood, identity and form as a porous entity that constantly overwhelms its material boundaries. “We don’t end at our edges,” the works insist. 

Urging the viewer to learn a different way of connecting through the porosity and flexibility of paper, Kashi revitalises the form of our associated life. The voiceover of the exhibition’s film sends viewers both a reminder and a warning: “Exchange – give and take – becomes very important. Breath goes in and out of our bodies does it not? In our time there is so much pressure to live in silos, in islands. We are not a silo. We are not an island. Society is interconnected, and we have to allow for the open nature of interaction… Paper becomes a web to hold both individual memory and cultural memory.”

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All quotes used in the article (unless otherwise mentioned), are drawn from conversations with the artist that took place intermittently over six months (February to July, 2025). The last conversation took place on July 10.

Aranya Padil is a poet, and writer-curator based in Delhi, a place to which he doesn’t belong.