Build it up and bring it down
BENGALURU: The Lalbagh Hillock makes Bengaluru’s geological identity similar to the likes of Ramnagar and the Closepet granites. Stone sculptures that have given the city it’s cultural history, such as the iconic Nandi at Bull Temple, a 15- foot high sitting bull carved from a granite stone and the Veera Ballala III slab that was recenlty found in Kattigenahalli near Yelahanka.
Chandana Bangalore, a city-based sculptor, named after this city by her father who practised geology for 34 years in the Mines and Geology Department of Karnataka, has experimented with multiple materials in her studio. But it is the soapstone, which is widely used for ornamental purposes in the southern belt of India, that has been instrumental to her work as an artist. Made up of talc-schist, soapstone is a type of metamorphic rock.
Chandana and Salomi, best friends and fellow artists who shared a studio before deciding to go on a road trip to pick the right stones. They set off on their road trip to find just the suitable shapes and sizes to carve, and made their way to the source at a quarry at HB Kotte, between Mandya and Mysuru.
They realized that a normal car wouldn’t get them into the mine, so the excited artists hopped on a tractor that was the only feasible vehicle to go on that terrain. After hours of searching, being the only women on site for square kilometers on a mining site, they learnt about traditional practices of identifying stones. They came across a few pieces of stone of their interest, and a crane was arranged to pick them up.
Back at the studio, Chandna battled sexism, as according to most, sculpting was an activity that required ‘strength’. Having finally found her safe space, Chandana began sculpting away. To relate her art with her life and her journey so far as a woman, Chandana decided to take the sculpture through five stages for the five days of an exhibition she held.
Day 1 : “You were born raw and so was she, knew nothing. She was just there. She was hammered into what the society wanted” the first entry in Chandana’s diary commenting on the traditional knowledge of the practice of stone sculpting in this atmosphere where someone making more noise would be regarded as the Alpha of the practice, as she broke away major chunks of the stone to make a simplistic figure of a woman sitting on the ground with her knees close to her chest.
Day 2 : Layered. “She is now growing, ‘Fitting in’ perhaps. She has started to cover up. Everything about her is being shadowed, there is no her anymore. Shaped to what society wanted. She had to let go and adapt.” Purists of the practice believed and professed stone must be kept raw and exposed, but as a practioner, Chandana was attempting to metaphorically align her practice with gender constructs, again receiving much flak for challenging traditional norms of sculpture.
Day 3: “She is red, she is blue, she is white, she is green, she’s black, she’s yellow” It is know that with scientific evidence that sculptures in the past used to be coloured but after some time in history, cultures changed and stone sculptures started being left exposed. Here Chandana expressed to multiple hues of different emotions of layers make up a personality.
Day 4 : Labels such as ‘ Cheerful, motivating, strong, attractive, intelligent, charming, romantic, soulful, sophisticated, intelligent, generous, giving, humble, kind, daring, fearless, charismatic, adventurous, dynamic, thoughtful, compassionate, ambitious, grateful, enthusiastic , polite, chirpy, calm, loving, crazy, loyal’ that have forever objectified and constrained through classical literature on what women
are, appeared as text on this piece.
Day 5 : Death. This stage entailed a performative act where Chandana started chipping away the entire sculpture, bit by bit over seven hours till nothing was visible of the original form. Onlookers seemed shocked and in awe of the energy Chandana brought to this manic act of destroying what she had worked on for a couple of weeks now.Chandana metaphorically broke herself from any chains that restrict, freeing herself from an evaluation of tradition. “ It was liberating,” says Chandana in retrospect.
A way to look at this act is how the artist is challenging time and death by taking the power to destroy their own legacy, like Shiva’s Tandava’s dance of destruction. Destruction is, after all, another form of creation.