Meppayil has arrived at a form of abstraction via an exploration of a poetics of making rooted in an artisanal practice. The daughter of a goldsmith, she transposes the rudiments of an ancestral savoir-faire as the basis of a contemporary plastic language for critically revisiting the modernist/minimalist crux. The process-oriented dimension of art-making to which she has been increasingly drawn over the last few years accords a primacy to materials and work implements : the markings that are the imprints left on a white surface by a range of goldsmith’s tools, notably thinnam, miniscule indents whose shapes depend on the particular inflection, the angle or bend, of the metal instrument’s tip. So the means deployed couldn’t be more exemplarily minimal : notches, repeated at close intervals on an immaculate gesso panel, that follow the shape of the support. And yet the welter of effects created by these minute dents ! Seen from afar the impression is of a white square or rectangle barely differentiated from the white wall behind it ; in middle distance, however, the object appears to be poised on an optical threshold, the source of a diffuse vibration or flickering ; in close-up, a sensation verging on dizziness, as if speckles the colour of white egg-shell had become visible to the eye without the aid of a microscope, a succession of hundreds of dashes endlessly extended (or so it seems) and only brought to a parenthetical close by the vertical margins of the support. The gold is materially absent but metonymically present, and it is surely a marvel that at a stroke, as it were, she inscribes a local artisanal practice within a nexus of art historical issues – the poetics of the grid, the aesthetics of repetition, the optical atmospherics of the modernist monochrome versus earthbound minimalist objecthood – deemed to have been crucial for the very definition of a certain canonical modernism. At a time when the indigenous is no more than a marker for flaunting cultural difference in a globalized art world avid for ethnic novelty, her work quietly testifies to the ways in which traditional practices, in the hands of an artist fully aware of the historicity of forms, can be a source of genuine enrichment in the interrogation of a medium.