Breaking The Mold
By PETER NAGY
Primordial and ubiquitous, earth, dirt and clay speak to the very core of our beings and can spark our most fundamental creative energies. Some of the earliest man-made objects known are made from clay and fragments of functional pottery found at archeological sites are decisive evidence as to the levels of development of the people who lived there. The earliest ceramic shards found in the Indian subcontinent hail from the Sothi Siswal Culture, named for two sites straddling the present-day states of Rajasthan and Haryana, respectively. Attributed to the Chalcolithic, or Copper, Age, these ceramic vessels may have been created and used as early as 4600 BCE. We are well acquainted with the sophistication of figurative sculptures made of clay from the Harappan Civilization of the Indus Valley (dating from approximately 3000 to 2000 BCE), where fired clay was also used extensively in the construction of cities. Clay and its manipulation seem to be at the very heart of the development of human consciousness. With the rise of digital art forms in the past two decades, those guided by photographic and computerized methods and designed for instantaneous mass distribution, we have seen a parallel movement towards the appreciation of the artisanal, the handmade, the slow, and the intimate.
As more of our information and communication becomes purely visual and aural, our brains crave to also indulge the senses of taste, touch and smell. This is true of both the creators and the audience. For every artist exploring Artificial Intelligence and digital coding to create art, there is another who is happy to indulge in the meditative maneuvers of carving stone or wood, or to feel the caress of wet clay as it is pummeled and cajoled. In 2016, a small group of artists who work primarily in ceramics came together to hypothesize an exhibition. What if the breadth of practices involving ceramics today could be presented as an Indian Ceramics Triennale, highlighting those who are expanding our conceptions of an ancient medium claiming its place in the future? Their conscious focus was to move away from the notions of Studio Pottery and functional ceramics, allowing artists working with clay to explore hybridity, diversity, and discovery, at the same time enabling a very loose definition of ceramics to be operative.
Long relegated to the status of second-class citizen in the world of art, in the 21st Century ceramics has taken on a renewed urgency and relevancy in international contemporary artistic practice. Beginning in the 1970s, Post-Modernism initiated the eroding of boundaries between the established parameters of art, with painters, sculptors and architects taking interest in the Decorative and Applied Arts, for reasons both political and fashionable. With the turn of the millennium, arguably all of the hierarchical distinctions between artistic mediums and categories have been erased and we witness an orgy of cross-pollinizations. The globalization of the contemporary art world, facilitated by biennials, art fairs and the internet, renders moot previously-held prejudices between geographies, histories and cultural lineages, opening up further avenues for discovery, conversation and research. These developments enable us to elevate artistic mediums such as ceramics, textiles, furniture and metalwork, formerly defined as Crafts, on to the platforms previously reserved for Painting and Sculpture. Marxism, Feminism, Queer Theory and Subaltern Studies also contribute to these radical transformations of artistic categorization we have witnessed in the past thirty years within both institutions and the marketplace.
The Indian Ceramics Triennale sought to exploit these developments, allowing for anyone using clay, dirt, or earth to participate, especially when they were combining them with other materials and processes. This opened the door to exciting proposals for new works from artists who used ceramics as a sort of binding agent for objects made of other materials. Particularly impressive, in this regard, were works by Danijela Pivašević-Tenner, Partha Dasgupta, and Vishnu Kolleri, for whom clay acted as a skin or glue to fuse together disparate elements (found furniture in the case of Tenner and bamboo and sound equipment for Kolleri) or individual ceramic elements brought together into a display cabinet, its surfaces “painted” with clay slip (by Dasgupta). Others artists (specifically Rahul Kumar & Chetnaa, Reyaz Badaruddin, and Shalini Dam) addressed the space of painting more than sculpture, combining ceramic elements with other materials to make wall-mounted works of a successfully confused hybridity.
Seriality was an important aspect of Modernist sculpture in the Twentieth Century and ceramics lends itself to this continuing investigation. Whether made by hand or by using molds, multiple units of the same object can be easily produced, enabling slight variations in their production. In the works of Madhvi Subrahmanian, Hoshino Satoru, Ashwini Bhat, Antra Sinha, Ajay Kanwal, and Adil Writer, we see multiples of the same form repeated and combined to create large-scale installations, often with no arrangement permanently fixed and allowing for an infinite number of variations. These works flirt with the distinctions between hand-crafted and industrially produced forms, often eliciting a perceptual bewilderment on the part of the viewer. Similarly, Conceptualism, the end of the road of the Modernist lineage, has influenced the production of ceramic art. The work of the British artist Jane Perryman explores the idea of how materials are connected to specific sites, but also generate random patterns. In her work (Containing Time 2016), she traces the reception of found materials from photograph, to drawing, to the embellishment of exquisite bowls. Each bowl is labeled with the year when she found the materials included in its production, marking both time and space with a series of elegant gestures.
On the opposite end of the pendulum’s swing, Decoration in all its extravagant glory is still the reason for many artists’ endeavors. Thukral & Tagra’s works, (Longing for Tomorrow) produced at the Meissen Porcelain Factory in Germany, turn standard vases from the archives of the 300-yearold manufacturer into futuristic sentinels, with gilded elements and painted surfaces that reference Indian miniature traditions. The wallwork by PR Daroz, (Weathered Rock after the Rain 2018), is a grid of pillow-like tiles, their surfaces punctured by shots of pigments, a tour de force of the control of glazes. Perhaps the winner of the most outrageously flamboyant work in this Triennale belongs to Priya Sundarvalli’s sculpture (Blossoming: Being all of Them, She Stands There 2018). On an ovoid frame made from fiberglass and steel the artist has attached literally thousands of ceramic flowers, both in full bloom and as buds. This profusion of color is heightened by metallic and iridescent glazes, an alien garden that seems to have arrived from another planet.
Mud bricks, of course, are one of the earliest building materials created by man. So it comes as no surprise that architecture and elements of construction would continue to entice artists working with ceramics. The list is long and includes Aarti Vir’s painted arches (Shadow Crossing 2018), the stupa-like kiln created on site by Jacques Kaufmann (To Purify Space 2018), Rakhee Kane’s walls of organic jalis (Shifting Identities 2018), the surrealistic building models of Saraswati Renata (Antigravity 2018), and the brick maze that looks back at you by Sharbani Das Gupta (X’ing Look Both Ways 2018). Most impressive was the contribution of the Korean artist Juree Kim who spent more than a month on site creating a finely detailed model of a 17th Century building from the Pink City of Jaipur (Evanescent Landscape – Svarglok 2018). Displayed on a customized table, the artist poured water into a “moat” surrounding her miniaturized architecture at the opening of the Triennale and over the course of the exhibition’s three months her work slowly melts into liquid, collapsing into ruin. One could even propose that the sculpture by Tallur LN (Man Exhibiting Holes 2018) is a model for a large-scale skyscraper in the shape of the artist’s own head, constructed as it is from terracotta hollow bricks and cement.
Spread throughout the galleries and public spaces of the Jawahar Kala Kendra, the Indian Ceramic Triennale could have easily been interpreted as a show of cutting-edge sculpture and mixed-media art, had the C word not been in the title. Today, clay and ceramics are just one of an infinite number of materials artists have at their disposal, but one cannot deny the seductive qualities of clay and its unlimited potentiality. Surely the Triennale will now inspire many more artists to experiment with ceramics and its next iteration in three years’ time will certainly be a momentous event for the art world of India.
