Material Encounters from Zarina's Studio

There is an almost clandestine thrill to seeing an artist’s tools and materials. They offer a glimpse behind the finished work, revealing the decisions, experiments, and acts of making that shaped it. Perhaps more than any other medium, printmaking benefits from this kind of encounter. The making of a print is not always self-explanatory to the uninitiated. Unlike painting or drawing, where most viewers can picture the act of dragging a brush across canvas, or a pencil over paper, printmaking often remains opaque to those not versed in its many processes. The mark on the paper is created, after all, not directly by the artist’s hand, but through a transfer mediated by pressure. The artist’s hand marks the matrix—the plate, block, or screen—and it is these objects that reveal not only the artist’s labour but the process itself.

For Directions to My House, I am deeply grateful to Zarina’s estate, Luhring Augustine, and Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger for allowing us to present—for the first time in an institutional setting—not just Zarina’s etching plates and woodcut blocks but also her printmaking tools, paper samples, a sculpture mould, and remnants of her Tasbih sculptures alongside her art. These objects are artefacts of Zarina’s creative process; they are records of a life in the studio. They reveal not only the physical work that went into her art but also her playful and experimental approach to materials. They telegraph the embodied experience of making with an immediacy that outstrips even the most carefully written wall label. Viewed collectively, whether in the STPI gallery or through this photo essay, I hope they will deepen the public’s appreciation of how Zarina worked and her material intelligence.

Relief printing, especially the woodcut, is the medium most closely associated with Zarina’s practice. It was also the first printmaking process she learned. Newly married and newly arrived in Bangkok in 1958, Zarina noticed a Japanese woodblock print hanging on the wall at a diplomatic party. Having taken only rudimentary painting classes in Aligarh, she had never encountered printmaking before, yet she was immediately drawn to the medium. Unable to find instruction in traditional Japanese woodblock techniques, Zarina instead enrolled in a woodcut course at Silpakorn University. In Zarina’s own words, “the rest is history.” She felt an immediate affinity for the process, especially the act of carving, and used both electric and traditional hand-carving tools for her blocks. As the blocks for Cities I Called Home make evident, Zarina’s carving is distinctive: she often cut away the negative space, allowing the image to emerge from what remained in relief. Her graphic, single-colour prints evoke the printed page, one of the foundational sources of inspiration in her art.

Between 1963 and 1967, Zarina worked at Atelier 17, the famed experimental printmaking studio founded by Stanley William Hayter in Paris. These four years were formative in her development as an artist. Hayter was a generous and pivotal mentor to the young artist, introducing her to etching and to viscosity printing, the experimental technique then being pioneered in the workshop. Zarina also credited Hayter with a far more fundamental artistic lesson: abstraction. “At Atelier 17, I discovered abstraction. I credit Hayter for this completely—he pushed me to go beyond the figurative. It went against everything I’d learned in my painting classes in India, but I was happy to forget all that. I wanted to make art in this new way.” The vibrant, colour-saturated viscosity prints Zarina produced in Paris differ markedly from the restrained monochromatic works for which she later became known. Yet the lessons of Atelier 17 endured; abstraction immediately became foundational to her visual language, and she carried an experimental approach to materials across her prints, sculptures, and works on paper. The plates from House of Many Rooms reveal Zarina’s command of traditional etching and attest to the technical confidence she carried into her later work as an artist and teacher.

Paper was Zarina’s most steadfast material. Over the course of her practice, she printed on it, embossed it, folded it, pierced it, sewed it, stained it, crushed it, cut it, collaged it, gilded it, wove it, and cast it into sculpture. Her paper choices were informed by both her aesthetic and politics. In 1968, on her return to New Delhi from Paris, Zarina had difficulty sourcing the French papers she was accustomed to printing on. As a deeply-committed Gandhian, she also felt conflicted over her dependence on a foreign product, given the robust local papermaking traditions. Zarina not only switched to using handmade Indian paper for her work, she travelled to the papermaking centres outside Delhi to study the craft firsthand. In the 1980s, she taught papermaking at the New York Feminist Art Institute, and even planned a book on the subject. Over time, she expanded her preferred range of papers to include handmade papers from Japan and Nepal alongside those from India. These earth-toned, organically textured papers, often printed in black, and mounted on French printmaking paper, are hallmarks of Zarina’s aesthetic.

Zarina’s experimental approach to materials is most evident in her cast-paper sculptures. In 1979, drawing on her observations of papermaking in India almost ten years prior, Zarina developed a process of her own invention to create these works. She built moulds from custom Plexiglass shapes set within wooden frames, then poured pigmented paper slurry into them; as the water drained away through the slats of her frames, a volumetric paper form remained. The worn, tactile surfaces of these sculptures carry the haptic memory of her fingers tracing the stone walls of Fatehpur Sikri, which she visited often as a child with her father—underscoring the deep influence of Mughal architecture on Zarina’s practice.

A tasbih—the Muslim form of prayer beads, part of a devotional tradition found across many cultures—is both an everyday object and a cherished keepsake. While tasbihs can take many forms, in these sculptures Zarina refers to the two most common variations: strands of 99 and 33 beads. In Islam, there are 99 names of Allah, and a common devotional practice is to recite a prayer 99 times, using a 33-bead tasbih three times in succession. Between 2001 and 2018, Zarina created 20 different Tasbih sculptures. As these sculptural remnants reveal, the Tasbihs were a site of great material exploration and play for Zarina. Her beads vary in size and take the form of spheres, olives, discs, and little houses. She experimented with a wide range of materials and finishes, including sandalwood, wood gilded with gold leaf, wood stained with sumi ink, wood rubbed with aluminum powder, black marble, white marble, green onyx, and sheesham wood—materials not only sourced from South Asia but long associated with the region’s craft and devotional traditions. By supersizing this devotional object, Zarina gives monumental form to a Muslim signifier, allowing her Muslim identity and its material inheritance to occupy an increasingly prominent place within the language of contemporary sculpture.

Photography by Toni Cuhadi. Courtesy of STPI, Singapore.

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Spotlight introduces the innovative artists and notable exhibitions that are expanding ideas and approaches towards print and papermaking in the field of contemporary art.