Mashal Batra

I have been thinking around how we learn language. It takes me back to a memory of my childhood where I was using tracing-the-words booklet. As kids, we develop understanding through forms, forms of the alphabets. By tracing those alphabets, I was beginning to understand what those words meant. Sometimes my mind would like to trace without wanting to understand, it felt like I was making calligraphic marks and it felt so enjoyable. Even tracing the words became like making art.
My work is based on this idea of making marks and developing a new language. A language that I can’t read. It feels like automatic writing. Perhaps I was tapping into that memory of tracing the words. It makes me think of different languages that I have managed to learn while living across different cultures, but so many languages that I don’t understand and so many books that I can’t read. There is something lovely about not knowing a language. It’s a place of uncertainty. I want to know what it says but I really don’t because a part of me doesn’t want to take away the mystery or that feeling of sitting with something unknown.