Sosa Joseph’s liquid dreams

You know that feeling when someone tells you something and an almost physical understanding gains on you like dye seeping into a rag? Your heart beats that bit faster.

When critics write about Sosa Joseph’s work, they plump for words like “elusive”, “elliptical”, “otherworldly”. “The paintings seem to fluctuate”, they’ll say, or “What the painter may be getting at”, they opine, all of which suggests the primary function of an artwork and its maker is to talk. To spend time with a Sosa Joseph painting is much more akin to that slow dyeing of the senses. You want her paintings to still you, not to talk at you.

I’m walking with the Kochi-based Indian painter around her first European solo outing, at David Zwirner in London. It is a hot day but Sosa is wearing black denim and biker’s leather, her nails tipped in obsidian and charcoal. The sun is so bright I can’t focus outside without shades. The fierce elegance of Sosa’s outfit suggests she too is looking for a shield of sorts.

The exhibition is titled ‘Pennungal: Lives of women and girls’, with pennungal, meaning “women” in Malayalam, Sosa’s mother tongue. We speak, carefully, in English, and I’ve never wished as hard that I had more languages under my belt. Sosa is withheld. She comes at things like a deer or a dancer might, weighing her words and pausing cautiously. But you sense she could also silence someone with just a look. She is cloud and bedrock both.

The show comprises 14 works painted between 2023 and 2024. Most stretch as tall as a person, just one is as big as a big picture book, and all demand your attention with that unique grip that only water wields.

Water, in these works, is everywhere. Their titles evoke rivers and swamps. Bridges and boats frame the scenes they depict. The moon and long hair float on unbroken surfaces. A girl in a red blouse stands at odds with her smudged reflection. The rain sharpens into focus.

“I was born on an island,” Joseph says, specifically, the village island of Parumala in Kerala. Her father was a ferryman. Their house stood on the banks of the Pamba river. In Starry, Starry Night, she has painted a woman standing on a bridge with one child at her feet, the other attempting to jump out of her arms – or is she being thrown? –  into the water below. The horizon beyond them is liquid, land merging with sky, houses floating in the ether, an image she’s lived in. “You cannot separate the land from the sky. You can’t understand it. It’s a dreamy atmosphere. But when I see that, it’s real, it’s a real experience.”

As a child, she would sit for hours and hours watching the rain fall on the river. As an artist, she repeatedly comes back to the painterly challenge of capturing that. “Even if I were an accomplished painter, it would be very tough and I’m not an accomplished painter, it’s not easy for me to make a painting of rain.”

That ambition is pushed only further beyond reach by how loaded rainfall is.

“In my part of the world,” Sosa says, “we have six months of rain. And after the rain, of course, every year, it floods. Rain is a time of fear, but also, without rain, we cannot live.”

The Howl is a tightly cropped river scene of churning green waters turning lemon yellow in the light. The same alarm registers in the facial expressions and gestural presences of a person and a buffalo, both submerged to their necks. What land there is is shrinking to the width of the people sitting on its banks, knees brought up to their chins, baskets over their heads. One, only outlined, sits in the water, as if filling up from the inside. It’s not necessarily a conscious decision, she says, which characters are depicted as fully present and which appear to be disappearing. Absence, like water, is everywhere.

As the title suggests, the show centres on the idea of girlhood and of becoming a woman, of figuring out who you are but also being told how to be. In a recent interview, Sosa said of her childhood in Parumala, that “the entire upbringing of girls back then seemed to focus on what not to become, with little emphasis on what to become.”

The show’s central piece is a tableau, as magnificent as it is unsettling, of a grandmother figure, all in white with white hair. She is surrounded by young girls learning, as the title tells you, to find eggs inside hens. It developed, Sosa says, around the hand gesture the old woman is making. At first glance, you might think it an affectionate pat on the head of the kid closest to her. Then you take in its literal quality –  “this”, the woman appears to be telling her wards, “is how you feel for an egg up in there”.

“Because of my village upbringing, which is different from a boy’s, I know how to do this. It’s like you have to learn some things as a girl, not particularly about this [finding eggs in chickens] but a symbolic learning of many other things.” Sometimes these things you’ve learned as a child help in life, she says. But sometimes, later on, you realise other things you learned limit you.

“I wanted to become a painter to explore or to find my freedom,” says Sosa. In her work, she says, she can create her own things, she can dream, she can imagine. It is, oftentimes, the only thing she can do. She wonders if the names of real people that she has borrowed from her community for some of the (fictional) figures in her paintings don’t serve as a tribute of sorts for those people who have not lived their lives with dreams, who were not able to find their freedom.

In Night of the Viper, a man stands on the water’s edge, holding a woman all blue, her head flung back, long hair hanging down into the sand. Behind them, another figure holds up a snake. Small children look on from between the sugar canes all around. The tight crop makes the moon itself invisible. But its reflection is there, a lumpen round of cream in the muddied riverine depths.

“There is a story behind this,” Sosa says, “a very personal story. This is my father, that’s my aunt.” After a long pause, she says, “It’s a viper.”

“Was your aunt bitten by a viper?”

“Yes,” she says softly. But, she adds, “I am not painting to tell the story. I just want to explore this, the atmosphere of that night, the moon… I always think, how can I explore this moment as a painting? That’s the only reason I paint.”

Sosa paints compulsively. She usually works on several paintings at once, erasing, washing out, reinstating, painting over, the images accruing like mother-of-pearl in a mussel shell. She’s been doing this since she was little. She’d steal blank pages from her university-student sister’s notebooks to draw on. “I wanted to give the drawings to other students at school. Because I realised I was getting popular.”

She was saying, “I am here”, and getting attention. She was being seen.

In the day before we speak, women across India have been protesting the rape and murder of a trainee medic in Kolkata. That the woman had been attacked while asleep at work after a long shift is already unbearable. She was powerful and living out her dream to become a doctor and help people. It is enraging.

Neither of us have words for the brutality of this case. But later on in our conversation, Sosa talks about what keeps her making work.

“You mention the doctor. We know life is nothing. So what do we do? Where do we go?” She says she looks to the regular, the mundane, the normal, to find something to paint from. “I have to work and work and work. Then only can I live with hope. I have to produce and create. I have to be learning.”