ARTIST NOTE
These drawings to-scale depict multiple views I outlined while holding in my hand a single small particolored stone. The silhouette leaves a hole for the stone to inhabit, were it still to exist. The colored pigment that shapes the absence of the stone is made by pulverizing this same stone.
I pushed the pigment aside on the recto to create the evacuated silhouette. Imagining the hole bored to the other side, I colored the verso, too. All the pigment from the stone is used up in painting these multiple views.
The Crete Senesi area in Tuscany where I found the stone is formed from tiny fragments of small shells and sea organisms compacted with sediments of clays and sands from a sea that covered it millions of years ago. I fancy the stone contains evidence of the missing sea.
I dislocated this stone during one of my multiple walks on a local strada bianchi near my temporary residence in a tiny village in Tuscany. I shared a summer there with six other artists and the coordinator as part of the Amant Residency Siena. I painted one stone view per member of our group. I made these drawings as a gift for them, for us, for our time together and our time apart.
— Neha Choksi, October 11, 2023, Mumbai
