NEW DELHI: It’s not the kind of quietude you instantly feel comfortable with, as you walk through a forest where the sound of the jungle that gave you company a few minutes back, is now turning into a brooding circle of darkness. As artist Aniruddh Sagar takes each deliberate step into its thickness, unfettered by the dangers lurking ahead, the tress seem to be whispering in disapproval. As dusk falls on the leaves, Sagar gazes up at the moon crescent and drowns himself in its hypnotic glimmer. Minutes turn into hours and when he returns back in consciousness, he promises himself to mould his experiences into pieces of art.
That time has come. At Gallery Espace, where we meet him, he is participating in a group exhibition titled Earth Memory that brings forth ceramic sculptures from his adventures.
Mountains have been his greatest muse. The mystery that germinates from their essence is what keeps Sagar intrigued. When he was a little boy, he would travel to his mother’s house in Jabalpur. En route were the Vindhyachal and Satpura mountain ranges. Sagar would stay awake all night to watch them. As he was growing up, the Arawalis inspired him and he eventually began writing poetry on their beauty.
When words didn’t do justice to his enchantment, he took to sculptures. Through their craggy form, he developed a way of re-creating what he saw. “I always wanted to look on the other side of mountains. Although I knew that behind them would be another mountain or, perhaps, fields or something, I still felt adventurous about finding out. My inquisitiveness made me climb many of them to explore the mystery behind them,” he says.
The three rugged forms placed together in earthy colours, the mountain encircled by thick blue clouds, the plates with mountains etched on them—all speak of this fascination.
The wonderment he experienced with every climb engaged him deeper into their fold. Many of the works in the show are a recreation of the forms he saw.
Many of Sagar’s texturing tools are derived from the surfaces of stones, wood, leaves etc.
The work with a mountain and bird on plate is specially interesting because it represents an aspiration that keeps Sagar’s eyes sharply on his goals.
“I am an admirer of artist Jagdish Swaminathan’s work, that characteristically has mountains, birds and trees in them. I saw one of his paintings with a mountain and birds flying. It stayed in my mind for a few days, and then I created my own interpretation of it by crafting a plate with a mountain and birds, similar to that of Swaminathan’s, but in this one, there was another bird towering above his bird. It represents the heights I want to fly to,” he says. The work doesn’t challenge Swaminathan in anyway, but symbolically sets a high benchmark for Sagar’s desires.
Contradictory to what other fathers may have wanted from their kids, Sagar’s father never wanted any of his three children to work in conventional jobs. He wanted them to be artists. It was his father’s unfulfilled dream of being a poet and painter himself that gave him the motivation to encourage his children to chose alternate careers. Therefore, his sister became an actor, brother a cameraman and Sagar became a ceramic artist.
Like ceramic was consciously chosen by Sagar, in artist Rahul Kumar’s case, the medium chose him. Squatting on the ground to take a look at his high fired stoneware clay work, the prints appeared like secret codes at first glance. There are references of personal experiences through the use of impressions of hangers, bots, paint brushes, plas tool, keys, scripts and other such things. “They are all very personal associations. For instance, I have used my studio tools in one work.
That is the first set my father purchased from the UK when he was on an official trip. Those days we didn’t have online purchases and nothing was available in India. So, these were precious. A pair of pliers that my grandfather used, a brass pot that was the first before it became a rather large collection, clothe-hangers that were always scarce and a bone of contention with my sister—each has a personal memory,” he says. His house series, on the other hand, expresses emotions of irony.
Every work in Earth Memory is a emblem of human experience. For the viewer they mean nothing at once. But that’s the enigma art produces. Once you disengage from its original narrative, one that was written from the artists point of view, you become a part of the story in front of you.
Good to know: On view until August 4, from 11 am to 7 pm, at Gallery Espace, New Friends Colony