It is Bikaner House again. Its new Living Traditions Centre is currently home to an unconventional piece of art—‘Snowflake Reflection’. Amoebic in shape, a white rock-like structure sports a crater at the centre of its flat top. The Prussian blue of the concavity is the refreshing shade of caldera lakes. It is not just a sculpture though; it is a coffee table––an example of what multidisciplinary artist Mahesh Sharma calls ‘functional art’.
“People think art is only meant to be hung on walls and not to be touched. Furniture these days is used for a few years and replaced. I wanted to create something that combines the best of both—interactive art and furniture that lasts a lifetime and can be passed on from one generation to another,” says the artist, who is currently showcasing his first-ever functional art exhibition, Design by Nature.
The show has on display four different collections—Modern Wabi Sabi, Natural Form, Colour of the Future and Glam Style—in a wide range of mediums, including wood, brass, resin, plaster of paris, acrylic and more. The idea was, Sharma says, to keep all kinds of tastes in mind. ‘Snowlake Reflection’, for instance, is part of the Natural Form collection.
He wanted to literally, think outside the box. “I wished to break the popular notion that a table must be a square or rectangle. They are boring. Here, I borrow from the free form of different water bodies,” says the artist. As with the majority of artists, nature is Sharma’s muse as well. Besides the fact that he predominantly uses wood for his creations, the motifs too are borrowed from non-human life around him. So, there’s a whale heart sculpture, a three-dimensional painting of a family of frogs, zebra-printed consoles, a series of paintings on the four seasons of the year, a floor lamp made out of a tree branch and a leaf-shaped dining table.
Fifty-year-old Sharma is yet another Covid child, creatively speaking. An alumnus of the National Institute of Fashion Technology, his tryst with art, in the conventional sense, began only three years ago. The artist had a thriving career as a fashion set and runway designer spanning 20 years, during which he worked with some of the best names in the industry, including Tarun Tahiliani, Manish Malhotra and Anju Modi. “The pandemic gave me the opportunity to expand my creativity.
Before that, I barely had any time to myself since I was always travelling with the designers,” he admits. On an exploration spree, Sharma would venture out from his house in Ghaziabad to the numerous factories in Muradabad and other towns of Uttar Pradesh looking for scrap of all kinds, going through heaps of discarded material and fashioning them into art of a kind. On one such hunt, he discovered a set of 31 tiny sculptures of turtles (the largest one is about palm-sized). “They were dirty and dark with age.
I cleaned them, but kept the patina for effect,” Sharma says. He then created a sculptural painting, placing the animal pieces on a board of plaster of paris, acrylic and resin in the pattern of Olive Ridley turtles landing on a beach. The piece is aptly titled ‘Journey’. Sharma’s present challenge is to juggle between his two careers: set designer and artist. He admits devoting more time to his new-found passion, but old habits die hard. He has been designing sets for the India Couture Week finales for years now and intends to continue to do so. As for his next exhibition, he is currently working on a new collection which will debut in Dubai, early next year.