Fields of Sight – Gauri Gill, Rajesh Vangad

Fields of Sight is a unique collaboration between photographer Gauri Gill and renowned Warli artist Rajesh Vangad. The series began in early 2013 in Ganjad, Dahanu, an Adivasi village in coastal Maharashtra, India. A new visual language emerged symbiotically from Gill’s initial experiences of photographing the landscape. Looking at her contact sheets, she perceived that although the camera was capturing the distinct ‘chameleon-like’ skin of the landscape, it was missing vital aspects of what was not apparent to the eye, yet was vividly relayed in the great mythical and experiential stories narrated to her by Vangad. The photographs by Gill, inscribed by drawings by Vangad, reconfigure the photographic site both formally as well as conceptually, to arrive at new documents of multiple truths and knowledge systems. In the act of viewing the landscape through the eyes of Vangad, Gill rekindles the need to challenge the way we see things today, what our eyes capture and what may elude them. ‘As though one were photographing an old home, and the resident of the house came out, and began to speak’.