'AFTER'... ( Sculpture/Installation work )
Not even been a month, and we the MA Fine Art students of Chelsea College of Art and Design were already working towards our first debut exhibition. The more challenging aspect was that we were asked to work with a medium/process that was completely out of our regular practice methods.
Talk of comfort zones in Art!
So, performance and painting were out of my vision for the time being. I wasn't comfortable with working with video/sound art yet, and so sculpture I sought. I literally ran to the foundry to gather some clay. Ideas abounded in my head, but because of my inability to handle the material, everything that I made seemed seven seas away from what I actually wanted to make. Like conversations stifled in the throat because of a lack of a language's vocabulary.The forms that emerged seemed to laugh back at me. I struggled for a couple of days trying to make it dance to my tunes. But it wouldn't even begin to walk. And then, just as I do with my beloved canvases, I let the clay speak to me. It was tough, because apart from a sense of awe and excitement and a bit of frustration slowly seeping in, I had no relation with clay or the process of making moulds/3d figures.
But it did somehow respond back; and lead me to working with a more easier and suitable language of plaster as well; and what was first a life size idea diluted into a beautiful piece of sculpture/installation that nourished itself and grew in a day. I worked patiently and relentlessly with plaster, and one by one the pieces of the conversation fell into place and my dialogue with the outer world emerged. And instead of one, I had actually developed two works.
Here it is, along with a brief description of the concept :
Talk of comfort zones in Art!
So, performance and painting were out of my vision for the time being. I wasn't comfortable with working with video/sound art yet, and so sculpture I sought. I literally ran to the foundry to gather some clay. Ideas abounded in my head, but because of my inability to handle the material, everything that I made seemed seven seas away from what I actually wanted to make. Like conversations stifled in the throat because of a lack of a language's vocabulary.The forms that emerged seemed to laugh back at me. I struggled for a couple of days trying to make it dance to my tunes. But it wouldn't even begin to walk. And then, just as I do with my beloved canvases, I let the clay speak to me. It was tough, because apart from a sense of awe and excitement and a bit of frustration slowly seeping in, I had no relation with clay or the process of making moulds/3d figures.
But it did somehow respond back; and lead me to working with a more easier and suitable language of plaster as well; and what was first a life size idea diluted into a beautiful piece of sculpture/installation that nourished itself and grew in a day. I worked patiently and relentlessly with plaster, and one by one the pieces of the conversation fell into place and my dialogue with the outer world emerged. And instead of one, I had actually developed two works.
Here it is, along with a brief description of the concept :
'AFTER'
Death, for me, exists on different levels - physical, psychological, emotional, and practically every sphere of human experience. Death, for me, also holds different layers of significance. It does signify 'end' , but the precedents of the 'end' are not always one of pain or suffering, and the result of death is not always one of rest and release or peace. Death for me, also has different measures - it does not have to be the 'complete' 'end'. It does not have to be breathless.
Any experience that is intense and is deeper, and more closer to truth than the person has ever experienced, gives a sense of void after it. Any experience that takes a person beyond his accustomed and imagined comfort zone leaves him hanging up there, in space, displaced from everything, detached from everything. It leaves him feeling incapable - not because of incapacity but from a sense of feeling no need for any capacity anymore.
Periods of artistic/creative intensity leave one in such a state. Like finishing a painting torn from the walls of the soul and feeling absolutely no need of fingers after that. Writing from a glorious stream of consciousness and feeling absolutely no need of a mind after that.
'AFTER' is my sculpture/installation work that explores this state and space of the aftermath of an intense experience. Extreme pain or absolute utopia. Extreme solitude or overflowing belonging. Anything in the extreme that takes one out of the 'normal' sphere and renders one incapable of relating to that state of living again.
(Plaster of paris, umbrella, autumn leaves, Oct. 2013).
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