BENGALURU: As an artist, Trupti Patel has always found inspiration in existing within surroundings. So much so that she chose to explore the identity of the country through the earths that she has been “travelling and collecting.” Currently on display in Bengaluru, Patel’s works, titled ‘Place. Earths. Identity’, has her using soil and ash to explore the symbolic significance of man on earth in the forms of landscape and figuration. The body of work makes use of soil procured from 29 states of India, with each earth sample undergoing multiple fine sifting processes in order to be turned into a pigment.
“Perhaps it was my attention to the mute surrounding of landscape, its importance to my source of inspiration as well as finding a deeper meaning of my dependence on it that led me to understand the use of earth itself as significant message,” explains the Vadodara-based artist, who was in town recently for the exhibition. Her current show has two formats of work. The first has 12 units, each comprises 30 sheets of Indian handmade paper, deckle-edged and pasted together in an acid free medium. This is then bolted onto a board painted with ash from New Delhi. “The 29 sheets are chronologically painted with an edge each comprising earth from one state of India. Since these works were made before the change of state status of 2019, the number stands at 29,” says Patel, adding that the base sheet and residual image is gold leafed in order to represent an element of human preciousness to it.
The second format, has 24 individual works, and has two layers of paper. “The top layer of paper has windows cut and edged with ash from the capital Delhi to see the bottom imagery of rain, clouds, rice spike, fields, wheat stalks, grass and agrarian representations painted with all the soils from 29 states and a miniature human presence in gold,” says Patel, who has been working on these for the past six years. “They are a labour of love and a culmination of my understanding of clay/earth as a meaningful material,” adds the 62-year-old. Given the scale of her work, Patel had to incorporate help from other artists as well, especially those living in the North East, who helped locate earth from fields and sent it to her.
“This was a new idea to not fire the earths into a ceramic state, Instead I used the potent earths intact with their organic histories and not destroyed by firing,” she says. Patel also makes use of clay to represent the “human who comes from it and goes back to it, undergoing the various vagaries that life throws.” She refers to it like the physical initial sensitive modelling of wet clay being let to dry, going through the process of heat and fire. “Until it finally emerges under pressure either whole or broken.”
Patel’s life has taken her to several places, with her having been born in East Africa and completing various phases of her education across Rajasthan, Vadodara and London. This exposure to varying countries and cultures sharpened her awareness of identity and her understanding of surroundings. And identifying those memories of places came from remembering the particular flora, fauna and smells and significance of associated memories. “In retrospect, it is this thread of experience and meaning to identify with a place as recognisably it that seems to have inspired my intuition to creative expression,” she says.
The exhibition is on display at Gallery Sumukha till March 21.