To Touch Stone

To Touch Stone, 1989-1990, TATE Collection (acquired 2017) is continuous of key themes underpinning Sutapa Biswas’s work. It comprises “a large-scale drawing by Biswas of a reclining naked woman occupying nine sheets of Khadi cotton-rag paper arranged in a three-by-three grid. Although the model is the artist’s sister, the figure alludes to the artist herself. The image is both formed and unformed, with elements of the body existing only in outline (arms, legs, hair and breasts) with the face and genital area being most fully realised. The figure lies flat, diagonally stretched across the work with the feet at the bottom left corner and the head in the top right. Two sheets are completely blank…while the ground on which the figure rests is delineated not by line but by a flowing ribbon of words that occupy the lower [sections of the work]. These words read: 

from somewhere . from somewhere an indistinct sound came . murmer ~ n . to mutter; a rustling from the heart, lungs, etc., to touch stone . to touch stone . sometimes . stream ~ n , a running water; a river [, to touch stone .] or brook or rivulet ; a current ; to flow or issue in a stream, to run with liquid . on Saturday etc. etc to touch stone to touch stone . to touch stone . sometimes to touch stone with . liquid . weigh indistinct sounds . to murmer . to mutter . heart, lungs etc., a rustling sound from the heart . streams ~ n . to run with liquid, to touch stone . to touch stone . to touch stone . sound ~ v.t.i , to measure the depth of . from somewhere an indistinct sound , sounds ~ n . to touch stone stream ~ n , a running water ; a river , brook or rivulet , a current . to weigh in indistinct sounds like water . to touch stone to touch stone . to touch stone . to touch stone . sometimes . like water . to weigh indistinct sounds . a brook . or rivulet . murmer ~ n . to mutter . murmer.

An idea of emergence from fragmentation and absence is emphasised by the blank sheets of paper that make up the work as well as by the shift in technique to picturing the figure. Biswas’s engagement with issues of identity was largely played out at this time through a representation of metaphors for becoming (primarily read through the writing of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze but also the writing of the psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon). This idea of becoming is figured through her conjunction of image and text communicating a passage of time and a coalescing of being and identity. Furthermore, the image of a prone naked figure is situated within text that defines paradoxes of existence – sound that is weighed or stone being a hard substance that changes over geological time – subject to the transitory touch of running water, fingers or the rhythm of heart and breath.

The art historian Griselda Pollock has identified To Touch Stone as an example of Biswas’s underlying strategy to ‘“demythologise” otherness’, or to resist and undermine the sense of separation and alienation common to the postcolonial world:

The myth produced by imperialism/Orientalism is that there are other lands, rather than the spaces of interaction. To contest that myth is to refuse to be constructed as ‘belonging elsewhere’. For Asian artists born in India and growing up in Britain, for those intellectuals who actively see themselves living across the mythic spaces of a postcolonial world ... refusing in their persons to confirm that division, the critical project is the articulation of this demythologised, de-alienated space.

(Griselda Pollock, ‘Tracing Figures of Presence: Naming Ciphers of Absence, Feminism, Imperialism and Postmodernity: The Work of Sutapa Biswas’, in Institute of International Visual Arts 2004, pp.30–2.)”. Written by Andrew Wilson for Tate’s website, November 2017, revised May 2019