Jhinuk Sarkar

Tongues & Tales:
A conglomerate
of proverbs revisited

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16-28 August 2023

Open:15-28 August daily from 11am-3pm
Public Viewing: Tuesday 15 August 7-9pm
(soft drinks provided and bring your own beer/bottle)
Please contact @paperfig if you have any access needs to attend

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I dreamt that an alligator came from nowhere (in a contrasting scene to one that you’d expect to find an alligator in) to bite off my arm.

A friend quickly analysed this using internet sources and deduced that the dream was about needing to get out of a situation causing pain and distress. Reinterpreting this for myself into a dream about change and decision making, made me look further into the connections between reality, sensory experiences and the unreal – this is where I discovered Zhuang Zhou’s Zhuangzi [1] or Descartes’ Dream Argument [2]. The argument suggests for us not be so trusting of our senses that supposedly help us to distinguish illusion from reality. (But the sense of fear I had of the alligator felt so real….).

I woke up thinking about this all day and beyond. Why trust Taoist Zhuang Zhou and Plato, Aristotle, the Academic Skeptics who supported Descartes on this though? Didn’t my Bengali ancestral philosophers have anything to say about this? The jury’s still out on this for me, the closest I got was to discover Sri Anandamayi Ma’s sense of timelessness in the consciousness of objects. Totally bent my mind and made it all crooked in terms of spiritual thinking – that’s just not connecting with me…..for now. What really gets my attention is practical actions….how could I bring the sense of the alligator into my real world? Have I already done it by talking about it here?

In the 1960’s, George Sperling created a series of experiments [3] to prove the existence of sensory memory through echoic (sound), iconic (visual) and haptic (touch) memories. Eastern ideologies of theories around sensory memory incorporate olfactory (smells) and gustatory (tastes) memories. I am an existence of both worlds as my ‘home’ and the melting pot of these theories come together in storytelling some proverbs that come from everywhere in my experience. There may also be appearances of alligators….

Some of my storytelling outcomes are serious, some silly, some unrelatable, and some to provide a window into your own sensory memories. Share them with me if it’s exciting to, take away some private discoveries if that feels more meaningful….

Featuring my experiments of kitchen lithography, turmeric anthotypes and illustrating a melding of proverbs from Bengali and English cultures, this is not an exhibition, it’s a sharing of a step into expanding modes and methods of storytelling for my Illustration practice.

A closing workshop will take place on Monday 28th August, inviting people to drop in between 11am - 3pm to create a kinetic illustration. Join me (Jhinuk) on the last day of sharing this work and bring an object, story or memory with you. The workshop is open to all.

A kinetic illustration was devised as one of the sensory experiments behind the process of creating this sharing of work. The idea of this experiment is that the action in creating helps to illuminate the stories and memories based on traditions, proverbs and a sense of belonging or even being. I hope it’s a space for everyone to appreciate their own brains, not tuck it under their arm at their side to try and hide it. I want to find a way of laughing with the alligator, not fearing it.

I’m an Illustrator and Educator, but I learn best from doing, making, listening, and observing – the workshop is a beginning of an experiment to create space for more learning in these ways, I hope this interests you.

Some ideas of things you could bring to the workshop:

A sentence from a story
A receipt
Your favourite toy
A piece of music or voice recorded on your phone
A hat
Your current book
An object with something missing
A friend
A fear
Leftover dinner / food from yesterday
Plants
Mould

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If you have any questions, ideas or responses please get in touch with me on Instagram/Twitter @paperfig or email jhinuksarkar@gmail.com
Visit https://paperfigillustration.com/ to find out more about me and my practice