CHENNAI: Mention the word reinventing or reusing and our ingenuity knows no bounds. Anyone in this country with a sibling or a cousin, a size older, would have spent a major part of their childhood years in hand-me-downs. Open any refrigerator in a typical Indian household and the uninitiated would be presented with total chaos — spicy pickles disguised in jam jars and whiskey bottles that once witnessed night-long parties that drowned failures now glistening with crystal clear water to quench our thirst for success. Discarding anything after certifying it as useless has always been a well-thought-out decision in this nation.
It is no surprise then, that art too has often emerged from these discarded materials. Every artist is drawn to a certain medium to unleash the avalanche of thoughts that descend every day. There is canvas, stone, metal, video, and a multitude of materials to choose from. Some of them reject more conventional mediums and find their expression in elements in the vicinity that speak to them. To the rest of us, it may appear as the rejects of a consumerist world.
Mumbai-based artist Manish Nai has always been curious about discarded items, especially used clothes. It makes him ponder about the stories that must have accompanied them when they were in use, the people whose skin it must have touched, and how they chose to end their relationship with it with the simple act of throwing it away. With these clothes as his primary medium, he compresses and reshapes them to create sculptures, thus transforming them into something wholly new.
G Gurunathan’s practice has been strongly influenced by the material waste from his immediate surroundings. The industrial landscape of his environment in Chennai often led to encounters with discarded metal barrels, which once functioned as essential storage containers. It is this surface and how the vagaries of time and weather work on it that fascinates him. With this weathered, rusted, and discoloured metal as his base, he creates his artworks that remind us of landscapes from our distant memories.
Meanwhile, it was the remnants of the red oxide flooring from his ancestral home in Kerala that turned into a canvas for artist Saju Kunhan. Picking up pieces from the debris, he used them to engrave his series that charted his family’s past, while trying to connect them with broader contexts of migration and displacement.
For these artists and many more around the world, their practice is more than just a concern for the natural world or a need to convert waste into art to convey their messages. It is about a personal connection that they see in these discarded items — perhaps a trip down nostalgia lane or a strong emotional bond that they have forged with what has been abandoned in their terrains. There really is nothing that cannot be repurposed or given a new lease of life with a little bit of imaginative creativity. Art does precisely that by lending an unexplored form to the discarded. Wouldn’t it have been great if only we could reinvent many of our fading lives too?