Painted spaces: an exploration through embodied and expansive practice

ABSTRACT This article investigates the nature of perceptual and actual spaces created and occupied by painting. The focus is on two artistic projects taken up by the author that incorporate sculptural elements and site-specific explorations to create a series of work. The body of work retains characteristics unique to painting. These projects are situated against the background of a similar trend in contemporary painting that sees many painters taking their painterly gesture outside of the bounds and flat surface of the canvas. This investigation is also a search for establishing theory-practice relation as the author's own practice is analysed with the support of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theory of embodied perception. This theory proposes the radical notion that sensation is an active reflective process and vision works in unity with different tactile and kinaesthetic senses. Reflective analysis of author's evolving practice – from the two-dimensional flat canvas to expansive installations on the terrain of a Himalayan village – opens up a productive opportunity for exploring how contemporary paintings incorporate and respond to space. Application of pigments through gestural brushstrokes on appropriate surfaces and strategically positioning these painted surfaces following compositional rules are ways of creating paintings in an expanded space.