It's the idea, silly

Manisha Gera Baswani's works have sought an identity with indigenous art forms

The paintings of Manisha Gera Baswani act like a complex, porous membrane between the real world outside and the one she has imaginatively constructed inside.

For her, translating the visual experience onto paper and board is the core of art making, much more than the end product itself. Perhaps this explains her magpie-like drive to endlessly store "interesting looking things".

Old whisky cartons with iridescent red patterns embossed on them, psychedelic bindis, dark, roadside tattoos "" all find their way to her larder-like studio in south Delhi.

There, lying for several months, sometimes years, these objects of Manisha's desire await their turn. Such intuition, as it unravels, makes Manisha's paintings a combination of the familiar and the fantastical.

At the beginning of her career as an exhibiting artist, Manisha was greatly impacted by a range of traditional Indian imagery. Then, she expanded with ease into formats, settling into the miniature format for several years.

Here, she trained herself not only to work in the small format, using delicate brushstrokes and hours of painstaking drawing, but also began to learn about the context of miniatures, both in India and Pakistan.

Sitting on a small desk, by nine each morning, working as a contemporary miniaturist was an intense experience; "it was so much mind being used...I used to spend so much time just planning the space and recalling references all the time," Manisha recalls.

That began to change in the early 2000s. "I needed to stretch out. I felt like doing something large," Manisha explains of that transition.

Now, just a show removed from that shift, Manisha, while straddling both formats, has taught herself to work the miniature into the large, something like fixing a polariser on a lens.

It's a dramatic shift from everything else we've ever seen before from her. She has plunged herself with abandon into the world of art makers who never show in galleries.

The Sanchi paper cuts are just one case in point. "I have always made jalees in my work," Manisha explains, pointing out the most direct links between various bodies of her work.

"But this time, I have tried this experiment with the kind of jalees other people have made, as part of their art tradition. It gives a new dimension to the work, if someone was to take time to look at the work carefully."

But if you were really to look at things carefully, you'd see that the real link is Manisha's continued engagement with indigenous Indian art forms. The jalee in her works originated not as painted ornamentation but as part of her larger interest in the wider contemporary arts practice and traditions "" great and little "" that she encountered each day.

The jalees-as-collage in this series are painted over in almost fluorescent pinks and oranges, themselves a take on the combined projected image of India in tourist brochures and rich, woven, silk fabrics, mimicking the constructed landscape while acknowledging the quotidian.

"We have so much on our streets, I don't understand why we don't open our eyes to it?" asks Manisha in a moment of anguished irritation. "Why do all of us borrow our images from there?"

At her elbow is a slickly produced volume of the best contemporary young artists in the world today. India could stake it's claim here, for the collection includes Ravinder Reddy. But some of the rest evoke unhappy familiarity, having influenced the imagery of other artists here in India.

This is exactly what Manisha dreads "" to be familiar from another context. Her best buffer against this is her own visual dictionary, built up painstakingly from multiple sources and worked over with a strong individual interpretation. Is that enough?

Clearly not, because Manisha makes efforts to point out each source and why she chooses to use it. But that's only when you are in her studio, and she's there to speak with you.

The rest of the time she lets go of the work, hoping that the viewer will be adventurous enough to look at each device carefully and expectantly. Take for example her trick works, with mirrors and sequins, which reveal themselves only in bits and parts, forcing the viewer to seek out the secrets, so to say.

"This time I have decided to work not just in two dimension but look at the work in a broader way," Manisha elaborates, "because to me it is the idea, not a picture." This explains the inclusion of specific cedar frames and complex collages that require many rounds of experimenting before they hold together.

This approach then shifts the idea of art somewhat, as Manisha moves from working alone at her desk to broadbasing her art to include other skills (such as carpentry) and influences way beyond her own.

The acknowledgement of this diversity thoroughly enriches Manisha's work and imbues it with a rich contemporariety.