However mute the artist is as to any implicit meaning in her works, however inscrutable their titles, which are more often given as lettered and numbered codes, their material lists are revealing of the generative junction of unlike things that has come to characterise N Dash’s practice. Here, in MD_23, are ‘earth’, ‘acrylic’ and ‘straight edges’, among others. The first, primordial dirt, is applied as a muddied paste on jute backing; the second, plastic made pigmented matter, complicates the familiar immediacy of the first; the third, rather than a composition feature, is a precision tool made from metal, its machine-manufactured geometry so unlike the essential formlessness of the two mediums that precede it. The natural, the synthetic, the mass-produced – all these coincide into what one critic has described as “a single terrestrial substance…some new kind of hybrid anthro-soil.” Ground and ground are conflated in this work, as in so many of the artist’s compositions, the grit of earth and the underpainting beneath the painting. In raising mud from the horizontal to vertical, N Dash invites us to differently apprehend it for its formal qualities, yet simultaneously occludes its natural tones with artificial colour. This, in addition to the rigid structure of her composition, renders the organic newly strange, inseparable from human invention.