Siddharth Khajuria / Photography / Your Careful Facades
“But as the old proverb goes ‘chase the natural and it comes back galloping’. Good organisation cannot lose touch with the natural chaos from which the need for organisation springs. When we ignore the nature of things and forget our task we easily allow our tools to take over.”
Denis Pym, The Employment Question (and other essays)
1985, Freedom Press
My attention is often caught by the veneers we place over and around nature – often to tame, stabilise, or plunder – and how nature resists and responds to us.
The pieces below are early works from a new project, Your Careful Facades, a series of objects intended as talismans, reminding us that much of the world has been ‘made up’.
Each object consists of multiple layers: marine plywood; an inkjet photograph, surrounded by a hand-cut veneer frame; and acrylic paint. It’s a composite form that’s emerged through dialogue with artists, friends, a veneer specialist in Basildon, a plywood cutter in Southall, and an art materials shop in Bethnal Green.