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Photography by Evan Jenkins
Photography by Evan Jenkins
Suchitra Mattai Guyana, b. 1973
Osmosis, 2022
Salt, fabric, cords, wood
Dimensions variable
8726
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Named for the scientific process of osmosis, this glistening, salt-encrusted sculpture by Suchitra Mattai seems to rise ominously out of the floor. The mysterious form recalls a true story of...
Named for the scientific process of osmosis, this glistening, salt-encrusted sculpture by Suchitra Mattai seems to rise ominously out of the floor. The mysterious form recalls a true story of seafarers off the coast of Mahabalipuram who witnessed the appearance of ruins such as this when the ocean waters temporarily receded from shore prior to a tsunami. When the sea rushed back in, the ruins disappeared. They exist now only in the seafarers’ memories, and in folklore. Salt is a trigger for the osmotic process, which involves the migration of water molecules from one region to another and, in a manner of speaking, is about the emergence of something and the loss of something. Mattai has both a scientific and a poetic interest in the process of osmosis, relating it to the legacy of saltwater ocean migrations that have shaped her family’s cultural and geographic heritage. To create this piece, Mattai employed salt as both a sculptural medium and a chemical instigator of aesthetic transformation. The material empowers Mattai’s aesthetic expressions of emergence and loss as they relate to the layering of new stories and cultural traditions atop those that already exist. Mattai’s personal, familial, and cultural history has similarly been revealed, erased, altered, and in some ways constructed by the sea. “Osmosis relates in a way to the flexibility of storytelling,” says Mattai. “It’s about agency, pushing and pulling, ebbing and flowing, and the curiosity of probing what’s revealed, and unearthing what’s concealed.”