I hail from a town called Dubrajpur in Birbhum District of West Bengal. I have grown up surrounded by nature like lush green fields, flowers, fragrances. All these have been my all time companion during my growing up days. I strongly believe I developed a very close bond and relation with Nature during this time. My art thus predominantly revolves around this same subject. My love, connect and responsive behavior towards nature and natural elements has been a huge influence and support in my all round art making process. In my works, be it paintings or drawings of Nature, their characters, have always taken centre stage.
Along with noticing and dwelling with nature and its progressiveness in characteristics, I have always searched and found a lot of similarities in their visual characters as well as in a psychological & social relation with us, Human Beings, and our lives. It intrigues me always, as and when, I tend to notice and discover this relationship, how sometimes Natural Elements and Lives get affected by us, which provoked me to study the characters and others aspects of Nature deeply and personally document it for my works. I find immense satisfaction and happiness being in this process.
It could be the same reason why I have always been inclined towards working with natural mediums and elements, as I make my own surface/paper from natural fibers obtained from different sources like Banana, Sugarcane, Jute, Bamboo Leaf, Waste Tussar etc. I also feel more comfort in working with self-made colors which I make from flowers, wood, stones, soil etc.
In my paintings I have regularly focused on the similarities I discover everyday while studying Nature, I try to conceptualize it in my own way and create a larger image on paper/canvas using the various characters and images from nature which I imagine has a huge physical and mental proximity & simile with different organs & parts of human body and lives, thus giving a larger view of the specific object which has a visual co- relationship, The Human-Nature Bonding.
The passion and dedication I have for my art thus gets enormous encouragement from my love and connect with Mother Nature.

CONCEPT AND STATEMENT:

I have been working on the subject TUSSAR for some time now and have made my researches on the same. It’s a fact that tussar silk, as a material has an aristocratic value & it creates & enhances a brand image and style statement for who wear it in our society. On the other side there’s another grim fact that the tussar silk which is produced to enhance our image & fashion statement can be procured only after killing the insects whose saliva is used to produce the end product i.e. ‘tussar’. Our fashion can come into being only after the killing of innocent lives of the insects. This very fact has made me feel empathetic for such many lives & especially the life of those insects that are killed to satiate our selfish desire and this has provoked me to explore this subject through my works, to portray my emotions and feelings about this truth in my own way.
The insects are killed while they are inside the cocoon and they are processed in such a way that even if they have wings they cannot fly.
In my work I have tried to create an imaginary space, where these insects who cannot fly in reality but who definitely wish to do so, are given the freedom to fly, after they are coming out from their cocoons. A feeling of a surreal formation of life after death had been the driving thought behind this work.

Read about Ruma Choudhury’s contribution to the RACONTEURS Project