Line of Fire and Freedom

In the ongoing exhibition, With Her Hair Running Wild, Seema Kohli charts a life where line becomes liberation and colour becomes return

- DEEPALI DHINGRA

Dense with meticulous lines, teeming with mythic women whose hair flies free, Seema Kohli's canvases feel like living organisms breathing, pulsing, expanding. For Kohli, the line is not a tool but a beginning. "I don't know what image is going to be created or how it is going to render itself. At times, I am surprised when I look at the lines that I have created," she says. The exhibition With Her Hair Running Wild, currently on view at Triveni Kala Sangam, gathers the earliest and the latest of her works like chapters of an autobiography written in ink and pigment. But for Kohli, the show is not curated for an audience it is an inward reckoning.

"It is a conversation I have with myself while I paint a path toward self-discovery," she says.