Randhir Singh

STUDIES IN FORM

Studies in Form is a collaborative body of work between artist Seher Shah

and photographer Randhir Singh exploring overlapping ideas in architecture,

photography, drawing and printmaking.

Over the past few years, we have worked within our independent practices as

artist and photographer to create a space for collaboration. This space, which is

based on our interests in art and architecture, has been built around our

education as architects and explores methods of representing scale, materiality

and mass through relationships between drawing and the photograph. These

relationships have manifest in a number of different series over the years.

Mammoth: Aerial Landscape Proposals is a print portfolio that uses aerial

photography combined with black forms that partially block out the image of the

landscape. The Mammoth prints are about this simultaneous gesture of erasure

and construction, creating ambiguously scaled structures that respond to the

repetitive patterns inherent in urban planning and architecture. In the pale grey

drawing series titled Brutalist Traces, horizontal graphite lines are used to render

portraits of specific buildings into ghostly after-images. These drawings, which

are drawn from photographs, explore the contradictions between mass and

lightness, permanence and the evanescent. In the Machrie Moor photographs,

elemental stones that have been weathered over time are discovered in the

landscape, their visceral presence a result of their stoic stance.

In these different works, we look to allow for several threads of inquiry to enter

our collaborative space. Within this space we have tried to remain constant in our

engagement with the relationship between the individual and the larger context.

How do we represent an experiential nature of space around us that is in

constant fragmentation?

Studies in Form, an ongoing series of cyanotype prints, builds on shared

interests of architectural scale and materiality by mining our personal

photographic archive of concrete architecture built across multiple cities in the

1960’s -1970’s. From this archive we focused on four unique buildings that share

a number of aesthetic qualities including heavy massing, the sculptural use of

concrete, and repetitive structural grids. Our interest in these buildings also

signaled the many aspirations and desires within each of their respective

contexts.

From this archive we focused on four unique buildings, extracting architectural

fragments and drawing attention to the incomplete nature of the experience of

landscape. Our interest in these buildings (which share a number of aesthetic

qualities including heavy massing, the sculptural use of concrete, and use of

repetitive structural grids) also signaled the many aspirations and desires within

each of their respective contexts. Grouped into chapters, the four buildings are:

Akbar Bhavan (Shivnath Prasad, New Delhi. 1969)

Barbican Estate (Chamberlin Powell and Bon, London. 1976)

Dentsu Head Office (Kenzo Tange, Tokyo. 1967)

Brownfield Estate (Ernő Goldfinger, London. 1970)

Alongside these four, two additional chapters both reproduced as cyanotypes,

offer varying perspectives. A series of cyanotype drawings, titled Flatlands

Blueprints, explores notions of incompleteness and uncertainty as a counterpoint

to determined architectural expression. The sculptural forms and massing found

in the photographs is further explored in a series of wood cut based prints, titled

Hewn Blueprints. Working with architectural representational methods, such as

the plan and elevation, these cyanotype prints function between the precise

formalism of a blueprint and the intuitive nature of drawing.

Cyanotypes were one of the first photographic processes developed in the 19th

century emerging only a few years after the development of the daguerreotype.

They were a precursor to the blueprint, which was an important reproduction

method for architectural and engineering drawings well into the 20th century. For

Studies in Form, we were drawn to cyanotypes as a means to engage with the

fields of photography, architecture, drawing and printmaking.