Cold Was the Ground

Titled after the Blind Willie Johnson recording Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, this body of work extends Segard’s nocturnal drawing into burnt and scorched matter. Charcoal drawings on paper are shown alongside works made directly on fabric, the surface singed and darkened until the mark and its ground become indistinguishable — image as residue, a landscape recorded by its own burning.

The works read as fields of ash and low horizon, where light survives only as a faint edge against the dark. Shown as part of 4 Positions at Experimenter, Kolkata, the drawings sit between the intimate scale of the sheet and the enveloping darkness of the installation, holding the same tension between withdrawal and vast, open ground that runs through Segard’s practice.