Jaswant Guzder: Navigating East West Hybridities

by David Gutnick

Jaswant Guzder’s art is intuitive. Employing the simplest of means, such as ink, watercolor, brushes and paper, her work flows from her clinical work with refugees who have suffered displacement, loss and trauma. Their plight and stories of migration, however, are also hers. A child of South Asian parents, she understands first hand the diasporic struggle to belong, the quest for identity and the urgent need to define home. The artist creates in series and a work may take a month, a week or a day. Such intense immersion encourages free association, plummeting the artist into a place where memory and experience converse. Using a wide range of formats, Guzder navigates themes of exile, displacement and vulnerability, mining a wealth of cultural ideas and memories in the search for a transcultural identity. In English and French.

68 pages, Paperback