Hema Shironi’s gentle delineations of the house as a site of safety and of loss have been a significant
journey in her work and for those who have witnessed her progress. The house as embodiment of
shelter and a repository of the human values which reside in it has consumed her. The house and
the home that it once was, moved with her, recalling and documenting times of conflict. But the
artist transcends pain and invents ways of healing. These are contained in the signs which mark
the new pathways of recovery and rejuvenation. Shironi begins to revel in her triumphs as she goes
into uncharted territories searching for everyday emblems which she can reuse and transform. Each
stage of her travels are marked by a surprising twist: sometimes a bundle of belongings, sometimes
a fragment of apparel.
Thus her narrative moves from material to material, from medium to medium mirroring her account
of remembered experience. Memory evokes a body of images which she gathers and quite literally
threads together to make them universal in meaning. The darkness of trauma is set aside as Hema
Shironi’s work speaks of the persistence of life: delicate poetic trails of marks and new forms of the
lightness of being.
- Salima Hashmi