Sheela Gowda, Therein & Besides, Rivington Place, London, UK ( 12 January-19 March 2011)
When Sheela Gowda’s And Tell Him Of My Pain was presented at the Japan Foundation Asia Centre in 1998, the critic Kunio Motoe wrote that there was “a focus on basic or fundamental elements that embody the true spirit of modernism, transcending nationality, ethnicity and gender”.Freeing the artwork and its materials from their original socio-cultural background, allowing them to encompass other conceptual and formal significances, is still crucial in Gwoda’s practice.
In her new show Therein & Besides, visitors are welcomed into the first installation of two, of all people, by photographic portraits of wooden chips, sculpted and lighted as to resemble magic tree trunks. The main space is filled by the deconstructed geometries of frames painted in the punchy colours traditionally used in Indian architecture and interiors, with an upside-down table and a carved Indian elephant standing as symbols of the country’s daily and religious life. Intact, a smaller-than-usual wooden double door, painted in a bright blue, has been left open, recalling the mysterious entrance Mary finds in the children’s literature classic “The Secret Garden”. In regard of this installation, also the show’s curator Grant Watson quotes gardens, in this case the ones from Paul Klee’s paintings, where men and trees blend together into ambiguous hybrid species. Similarly in between of humanly image and figurative abstraction, of all people’s hundreds of tiny wooden chips present all different smudges of facial features, as they were made in Bangalore by artisans encouraged to carve them as fast as possible, and their humanoid forms cover every object and angle of the room.
Upstairs, in Collateral, dated 2007, bark powder and charcoal have been processed to produce an incense mould, that was eventually placed on top of eight steel frames and worked through a long stage of burning and melting to compose a panoramic landscape of ashes and calcified residues. In this case, however, the material has been minutely produced by Gwoda herself, concerned by the impact incense can have on the health and the economy of the Indian women and children that traditionally work it.
Peculiar materials and tremendous amounts of manual labour, tinged with a sort of obsessive perfectionism, are not extraneous to Gowda’s work. Famously, when working at And Tell Him Of My Pain, she painstakingly threaded hundreds of needles with 360 feet of red-dyed thread, discarding threads that presented knots. However, at a first impact, Gwoda’s artworks can be defined quite minimalist, as she has always been keen on concealing the obviousness of her labour, and on letting the viewers accommodate it in different intakes, as peeling off underlying layers of significance. The name Collateral in itself can refer to something reaching the same result of something else, while proceeding through the exploration of different routes, in a parallel line of action; and even if this meaning is mirrored by the geometrical repetition of the patterns created by the ashes, in reality, Collateral is also a true epitome of unpredictability, as the outcome of burning incense couldn’t be forecast.
Even if the two installations were created as independent features and as such can be enjoyed, they beautifully fit together, under a title, Therein And Besides, that is the ultimate invitation to explore new and different angles of the same reality. Traveling through the show, we become part of its storytelling process; the opened double door acts as the starting point of a personal story created by the viewer, Gwoda’s installations being just the medium to bring a flux of ideas and possibilities to life.
As in “The Secret Garden”, in art and in life things are full of nuances and undertones, change/evolution is possible, sometimes due and expected, and as in this case, enticing in its beauty.
Curated by Silvia 