<p>At Muziris Contemporary’s gallery in Colaba, Mumbai, senior contemporary artist Parvathi Nayar’s solo exhibition, The Primordial, brings together over a decade’s worth of her work. The creations blend seamlessly into a living timeline, connecting ideas from different phases of her artistic sojourn.</p>.<p>The title, as Parvathi puts it, is about beginnings: original cells, the first signs of life in ancient oceans, and the slow churn of the earth through time. “These are not separate origins but entangled ones, where matter, memory, and life continuously shape one another. The works move between these registers, suggesting a continuum between the microscopic and the planetary, the intimate and the vast,” she explains.</p>.<p>While these ideas play out through recurring images of water, salt, pepper, and cells like threads tying everything together, at the heart of the show is a simple thought: that earth, water, and humans aren’t separate, and that our bodies and histories are deeply tied to these elemental forces.</p>.<p><strong>Pepper and poetry</strong></p>.<p>One thread that runs through the show is her ‘Pepper Series’, first showcased at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014, which traces the history of the pepper trade. A force that pulled travellers and merchants to India’s western coast for centuries, pepper is more than just a spice for Parvathi. It holds a certain poetry, standing in for those older systems of exchange. “The series continues to draw me through its evocation of how knowledge systems were shaped by encounters between civilisations, often driven by trade,” she elaborates. Returning to it now felt timely for the artist. “Trade and tariffs remain charged, contemporary concerns, reminding us that these flows of power, desire, and negotiation are far from historical alone.”</p>.<p>This idea also comes through strongly in ‘The Grain that Moved the World’, which gestures to those early journeys across the seas. “It returns to the ocean as a connector, tracing histories of trade through pepper as both fragment and memory, where ecology, exchange, and time intersect across layered, shifting terrains,” she elucidates.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Another work she points to is ‘Tideflows-Salt and Water’, which stems from a long fascination with the ocean’s movement and geometry. Here, waves and dissolving salt turn into intricate, rhythmic forms.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Material is a big part of how all this comes together, as what the work is made of is as important as what it shows. Parvathi works extensively with graphite, and her black-and-white drawings carry a raw, textured quality, echoing salt, sediment, and organic matter. “Graphite has this granular softness that lets a surface feel both seen and touched,” she describes. Scale plays its part too. Some works stretch out and pull you in, while others ask you to come closer to notice the finer details. “There’s a deliberate play of scale,” she points out. That shift from the sweeping to the minute mirrors how her ideas move between larger systems and smaller, almost invisible forms. Not everything comes together in a straight line. ‘Saltforms’, a three-part work, began as what she calls “an abstract ballet of salt”, but grew into something else as it developed. “The shifting scales of salt forms, both as suspended particles and crystalline structures, began to also suggest the movements of trade, the rising salinity associated with global warming, and the collapsing micro-macro worlds.” Drawing from the salt pans of Tamil Nadu, the work brings together geology, climate, and history in a quiet, layered way.</p>.<p class="bodytext">“Any piece is always completed in the eye of the beholder,” she reflects. On one level, the exhibition feels like a meditative process, a tribute to the ocean, its movement, scale, and its ability to hold and generate life. On another, it touches on histories of trade and exchange that still echo today. But at its core, there is also a more urgent thread running through it. The ocean isn’t just an idea here. Teeming with life and increasingly fragile, it is essential to the very core of our being. “It is both a return and a reckoning: an invitation to consider how we emerge from, inhabit, and impact these ancient, living systems, and how their fragile balance underpins our collective future,” she summarises.</p>.<p class="bodytext"><span class="italic">‘The Primordial’ is on at Muziris Contemporary, Colaba, Mumbai, till May 1.</span></p>
<p>At Muziris Contemporary’s gallery in Colaba, Mumbai, senior contemporary artist Parvathi Nayar’s solo exhibition, The Primordial, brings together over a decade’s worth of her work. The creations blend seamlessly into a living timeline, connecting ideas from different phases of her artistic sojourn.</p>.<p>The title, as Parvathi puts it, is about beginnings: original cells, the first signs of life in ancient oceans, and the slow churn of the earth through time. “These are not separate origins but entangled ones, where matter, memory, and life continuously shape one another. The works move between these registers, suggesting a continuum between the microscopic and the planetary, the intimate and the vast,” she explains.</p>.<p>While these ideas play out through recurring images of water, salt, pepper, and cells like threads tying everything together, at the heart of the show is a simple thought: that earth, water, and humans aren’t separate, and that our bodies and histories are deeply tied to these elemental forces.</p>.<p><strong>Pepper and poetry</strong></p>.<p>One thread that runs through the show is her ‘Pepper Series’, first showcased at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014, which traces the history of the pepper trade. A force that pulled travellers and merchants to India’s western coast for centuries, pepper is more than just a spice for Parvathi. It holds a certain poetry, standing in for those older systems of exchange. “The series continues to draw me through its evocation of how knowledge systems were shaped by encounters between civilisations, often driven by trade,” she elaborates. Returning to it now felt timely for the artist. “Trade and tariffs remain charged, contemporary concerns, reminding us that these flows of power, desire, and negotiation are far from historical alone.”</p>.<p>This idea also comes through strongly in ‘The Grain that Moved the World’, which gestures to those early journeys across the seas. “It returns to the ocean as a connector, tracing histories of trade through pepper as both fragment and memory, where ecology, exchange, and time intersect across layered, shifting terrains,” she elucidates.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Another work she points to is ‘Tideflows-Salt and Water’, which stems from a long fascination with the ocean’s movement and geometry. Here, waves and dissolving salt turn into intricate, rhythmic forms.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Material is a big part of how all this comes together, as what the work is made of is as important as what it shows. Parvathi works extensively with graphite, and her black-and-white drawings carry a raw, textured quality, echoing salt, sediment, and organic matter. “Graphite has this granular softness that lets a surface feel both seen and touched,” she describes. Scale plays its part too. Some works stretch out and pull you in, while others ask you to come closer to notice the finer details. “There’s a deliberate play of scale,” she points out. That shift from the sweeping to the minute mirrors how her ideas move between larger systems and smaller, almost invisible forms. Not everything comes together in a straight line. ‘Saltforms’, a three-part work, began as what she calls “an abstract ballet of salt”, but grew into something else as it developed. “The shifting scales of salt forms, both as suspended particles and crystalline structures, began to also suggest the movements of trade, the rising salinity associated with global warming, and the collapsing micro-macro worlds.” Drawing from the salt pans of Tamil Nadu, the work brings together geology, climate, and history in a quiet, layered way.</p>.<p class="bodytext">“Any piece is always completed in the eye of the beholder,” she reflects. On one level, the exhibition feels like a meditative process, a tribute to the ocean, its movement, scale, and its ability to hold and generate life. On another, it touches on histories of trade and exchange that still echo today. But at its core, there is also a more urgent thread running through it. The ocean isn’t just an idea here. Teeming with life and increasingly fragile, it is essential to the very core of our being. “It is both a return and a reckoning: an invitation to consider how we emerge from, inhabit, and impact these ancient, living systems, and how their fragile balance underpins our collective future,” she summarises.</p>.<p class="bodytext"><span class="italic">‘The Primordial’ is on at Muziris Contemporary, Colaba, Mumbai, till May 1.</span></p>
