On Walking

After a prolonged medical condition due to neurological disruption for Neerja Kothari, the once automatic act of walking dissolved into fragments. The rehabilitation process required the artist to  begin again—word by word, step by step—guided by the therapist’s verbal instructions, “heel” and  “toe.” These words, at once commands and metaphors, began to mutate in Kothari’s mind: heel  became heal, toe became tow. Language, like the body, was misfiring, reshaping. 

This installation is a poetic rendering of that process, revisiting the essays that once inspired transcendence—Thoreau's and Woolf’s reflections on walking—only to reduce them down to the most elemental physical necessity: putting one foot in front of the other. The installation is  grounded in two texts: Henry David Thoreau’s Walking (37 pages) and Virginia Woolf’s Street  Haunting: A London Adventure (14 pages). Together totalling 51 A4 pages, these essays served as  companions in aspiration—dreams of walking through forest and city, of wandering and wondering.  But while in recovery, they became ironic: while the essays soared in the artist’s mind, her body  struggled to move. The sublime was unreachable. The act of walking itself was the primary aim. 

In this project, the process of erasure becomes a method of drawing, the primary visual language of  the installation. The text on each page of the essay is redacted by drawing on it, it is blackened out —scratched over, obscured—leaving behind only the letters that form: “heel,” “toe,” and  occasionally, their homophones “heal” and “tow.” These remaining fragments—spaced irregularly  across the pages—create a visual rhythm, a walking cadence. Errors, omissions, and overlaps arise  from physical and mental fatigue, echoing the labor and repetition of relearning movement through  physiotherapy. Over time, the letters become constellations—a sky-map of recovery, persistence,  and poetic logic.Together the pages forge a landscape of redaction, where what is missing becomes  as meaningful as what remains. A gesture of obliteration becomes an act of illumination.  

This project revisits the fundamental aspects of Neerja Kothari’s artistic practice —the inadequacy  of the empirical or the absurdity of scientific certainty which when countered by metaphysics  presents glaring gaps. The irony of relying on empirical logic to relearn whimsical, intuitive  movements of the body that most of us take for granted with relative effectiveness, as experienced  by the artist, forms the crux of her practice. By breaking down her visual vocabulary and artistic  process down to their essential formal logic in her works, Kothari places her viewers at a similar  vantage point that she occupies where the ‘real’ that saturates the world around us and civilizational  processes of meaning-making that we take for granted are derealized, and thrown into question. 

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