Yasmin Bawa - Reimagining Our Roots
Written by Sophie Marx
In 2024, Pluto was in retrograde, moving backward through the zodiac signs from Capricorn to Aquarius. While this motion in reverse often turns our world upside down, creating chaos within ourselves, Pluto’s journey caused us to be reflective, endorsing us to look inward as the dwarf planet spurred on transformation.
It was within the timeframe of this astrological phenomenon that the artist Yasmin Bawa entered into a period of introspection and rest after making the long-anticipated move from Berlin to the south of France. There, her studio is integrated into the mountainscape—a creative safe haven for her research into herself and the world.
Without having an artistic outcome in mind at first, she allowed her mind to sprout in the newfound silence as she reconnected with the foundations of our existence, which ultimately resulted in a body of work exhibited in the Saint Anne Gallery in Paris this winter, titled Vital Spaces.
For three years, her mind space had been occupied by the desired move. When she left the city for the mountains, she realized how freed her mind had suddenly become from previously focusing all of her energy on making this change.
“Before the move, I had this very intense period of working, and then I moved to a new country, to a new house, to the middle of the mountains, which is what I always wanted. Even if there wasn’t any negativity around it, it was a lot.”
“I took several months where I was researching and reading a lot and just really, like, finding sort of a new sense of place. It was a really nice motivation to create work, so I let myself concentrate on creating a body of work which is representative of this move and finding your own sense of place.”
Predominantly a sculpture artist, Bawa’s inspiration is born out of active meditations, which allow her subconscious to guide her to imagine shapes and colours as her mind relaxes. “A lot of the forms have come from doing kind of active meditation, where you let your brain relax. Through this, I am trying to envision sculptures, and then I go into the studio and start building sculptures one-to-one.”
“I work on the sculptures as individual creatures, these little bits of energy. Some of them represent different feelings, but it’s nothing tangible. It’s a completely intuitive process.” Bawa’s sculptures distinguish themselves through their curved, unidentifiable shapes, created in earth-inspired tones of white, beige, terracotta, and grey. Within the curvatures, she includes intricate windings or highlighted carvings.
Most of her larger works have flattened surfaces, as she does not create her art to solely serve aesthetic purposes but to double down on functionality as well.
“I like the idea of it being art but being usable. There was also the element that I genuinely liked it being functional, but it also felt like I could actually make this work as a business. Maybe I could actually make things that I could sell and that people would buy.”
The idea of functionality in her execution originated in her ultimate dream of building her own house one day. As she was doing research on this, she stumbled upon a video where a material different from stones or concrete was utilized—hemp.
The material fascinated her as it is not only a more ecological option compared to concrete, but unlike stone, where you can only subtract, she would be able to add and subtract from hemp as the principal material for her sculptures.
“There is such a nuanced feeling to using hemp and using a completely natural material that is ecologically safer and where I can achieve a much more beautiful finish. Naturally, it made me very excited.”
The materials she uses are quite unique to anything I have seen before in sculpture art. Using hemp, lime, soapstone, and natural pigments not only enabled her to realize her vision for her sculptures, but they were the catalyst for her evolution as an artist.
“I was doing a meditation, and I pictured these shapes and colours. I had in mind these pinks and blues and beige, so I completely cleared a part of my studio and set it up for painting. I felt like I needed to grab onto these images. But as I am not a painter, it was a really unexpected experience, and then I really just drew. I used all of the paint soap that I had left over from my sculptures, so I already had all the jars, and I just painted them in two days.”
“I was jumping on the inspiration. It was surprising myself. The way that the paints work is that you have to do it in one go because it’s almost in between watercolour and oil, so you can't just keep adding because it doesn’t really go on top of each other. I did the backgrounds just to create the two key colours I wanted, and then I had the other ones, and I just painted. Once you do it, you can’t go back; you only have one shot, so luckily, they all came out as I wanted.”
Her paintings, titled Through the Void Vitality Flows, Opposition Between Jupiter and Uranus, and Between Here and There, and their unplanned creation as well as inclusion in the exhibition, only further underline the success of Bawa’s intuitive process.
Not having painted since high school, she was knowingly stepping outside of her comfort zone into a very emotionally intense process as she turned the metaphysical into an on-canvas realised reality.
“Painting is quite different from sculpting, which is a slow process where I have an image in mind, but as I start sculpting, it takes on a form of its own. When I paint, I have an image in mind, and it’s the same in 2D, so it is a slightly different route to creating them, but I would use the same kind of embodied energy.”
The birth of her most recent series is embedded in the concept of roots, whether it be to places, identity, or heritage. In her conceptual interpretation of them, she dipped both into the idea of roots as a natural phenomenon as well as them being a metaphor for identity.
“I had all these ideas of roots and of how roots can be seen as actual roots, these vital yet unseen sources that nourish and connect all plants and create this whole intricate network that we don’t see. But we can also speak of roots in terms of identity.”
Her own relationship to roots was influenced by relocating from Scotland, her home country, to Italy, Berlin, and now France. Not only did the physical uprooting from different places impact her sense of identity, but it changed naturally as she progressed into an artist, enabled more by each place on her way.
In her research on meditation practices, the matter of roots proved itself to be a recurring theme, existing also on a bodily level, as she familiarized herself with the vagus nerve, which runs from our brain through our organs and further down our body, where it fizzles out in branch-like tentacles, mirroring the shape of roots.
The nerve itself controls our entire body; utilized through deep, slow breathing or chanting and humming, among other practices, the vagus nerve activates a relaxation response, regulates our heart rate variability, and enables emotional processing and stress reduction.
“When I meditate, I don’t sit in a perfect meditation for an hour. I am just listening to my intuition, but in my studio, I didn’t really have a place to sit aside from a chair since the floor is dirty. That was until I was looking at seed pots one day. I was looking at these things that are just about to grow into something else. It made me think that it would be amazing to have a meditation pillow that has roots on it and that you can put on yourself, almost like a weighted blanket.”
Wanting to keep going with textile interactive sculptures she had made previous to her Vital Spaces series, she decided to exhibit the root-inspired meditation pillow. Aligned with her principal material, the textile sculpture is made out of hemp fabric, filled with hemp, while its colour comes from the same pigmented soap she used in both her sculptures and paintings.
“It’s all the same materials; the only difference is how I process or use them. Through that, I was able to create different forms—the paintings, the sculptures, and the textile—all of which have the same elements in them which connect them.”
Her own journey, captured in these three different mediums, two of which she used and included to her own surprise, all came together in individualistic unity at the Saint Anne Gallery, creating their own ecosystem within the given space.
Yasmin Bawa’s style of obscuring her work to show emotions or states of being instead of clearly graspable objects created an air of mystery around her work, which enables the audience to form their own narratives around the art.
“The series incorporates this idea of energies and feelings that are vital to discovering a sense of self or discovering a new sense of place, which is what this work is about.”
