A great piece of work, as often seen in history, stems out deriving inspiration from the simple and common things around – be it the bird’s nest stadium at Beijing, the palm island in Dubai or the Lotus Temple in India. Likewise, artists at the Golden Bridge pottery seem to have found their creative outlet through the modest bucket.
Inside the Forum Art Gallery rests an array of buckets – a global collection of work by 22 artists – crafted using ceramics, porcelain, terracotta and stoneware. The buckets, revolutionary and metaphoric, succeed in erasing the conventional image associated with it – of being a medium for daily ablutions, and instead allow the visitors to indulge in their creative curiosity.
Placed right at the entrance is Rey Meeker’s Well Wisher, a perfectly smoothed out round barrel with a rope snaking around it. Merging into a picturesque village, it reminds one of the barns sheds, animal pens, plowed fields and pastures. As if to commemorate this declining eco system, Aarti Vir’s No more water, the fire next time is an innuendo about the dry wells and whiffing taps.
Almost as an epilogue to the water issue, comes Singapore artist Madhvi Subrahmaniam’s Thirst. Contrary to what a bucket is used for, the intertwined ceramic lines with gaping spaces is a stark depiction of water wastage. Her work, she says, has come out as a result of her visits to the South Indian villages where the sight of villagers carrying water in plastic buckets rather than the terracotta ones helped her recognise the changing traditions. However, she asserts, “Indians won’t let go of their traditions completely as we are more attached to the soil than others in the world. This is evident from the way we cook and eat.”
Anjani Khanna’s baltee bath helps extinguish this burning issue momentarily and takes us to a parallel universe of yalis – where these mythical humans with the head of an animal are seen sitting inside buckets, with few bathing their young ones. Yalis, according to the Alibag-based artist, helps her negotiate between the opposites, be it urban and rural or female and male and so on. Challenging one’s intellectual interpretation further, is Priya Sundaravalli’s You, I and the Milky way. The sheet of pure white limestone powder at the base is meant to depict the sand dunes that are “beyond earthly – that which harnesses harmony and beauty” as she likes to put it.
“The show is a clever take on a mundane object so as to elevate it to a status where it can be reinvented,” says Shalini Biswajit, Artist and Director, Forum Art Gallery. With the show being the third of its kind at the gallery, she says that this is an attempt to recognise ceramics as a potential medium of art forms.
Onlookers can’t help but linger a little while longer to take a peek inside Indrani Singh Cassime’s bucket which has ceramic fingers clutching the sides, or fondly smile at Deepika Talwar’s abstract work embodying one’s childhood memory of a bathroom with filled buckets.
While the pleasantly brief exhibit allows one to appreciate the usually underestimated art of pottery, it also whets one’s appetite about art. Those interested can attend the workshop at the gallery by Kaveri Bharath, the brainwave behind the bucket show herself, on June 22.