I'm Sheela Gowda, an
artist, I live in Bangalore in South
India. I started out as a painter, but now
I work with sculptural installations and
also painting, but in a very different
way. I am constantly, kind of, observing
and you observe from a personal point of
view, you observe from finding something
that's new or surprising and not
everything that you find becomes
material for a work, but there is a
moment when an idea and a material
comes together.
I think it's all the more relevant at
this point in India to do what I'm doing,
things are changing really quickly, but I
don't think what's happening now is
necessarily a positive, in fact we are
going backwards in many ways. So this is
my studio that I built first, before
I built my house and it's a custom-built
studio and was actually quite large when
I built it but it has shrunk. There's so much stuff in it and also my work seems to
have gotten bigger and I'm a little bit
of a hoarder, I don't let go of small
things or big things which I think might
be useful. So having brought something
home to my studio and looking at it
doesn't necessarily then lead to a work. It
could be that action actually takes me
to something else so these gestures of
material locating or looking for one
material and finding another, all these
are certain processes of making or
how a work comes about. For me the formal
concerns of a work is very important and
I see it as a big challenge to bring
about an idea through a formal language
and that is usually underlined by the
material that I use. The material also
has a different context of its own and
so I try to either transform the
material without changing its identity
too much and I try to weave in my own
ideas
in the larger sense of the work, so both
of them exist side by side. At no point
has my work been sculpture, in the pure
sense, it's always been a relationship to
space or your relationship to it as a
viewer, which is the case with the work
'Behold' which was done for the Venice
Biennale. First time when I worked
towards 'Behold' I had with me already the
raw material for it, at least one part of
it, which is the hair rope. I have been
seeing this hair rope round around car
bumpers for a long time and in the early
90s when I was becoming aware of
materials for their own sake I also
collected the hair rope because it was a
very interesting object. I think it's
used on the vehicle as a talisman. There
is the question of being in control of a
vehicle, at the same time there's a great
vulnerability. Each row has probably
hundreds of individuals' hair within it
of all genders, ages, communities, so it
was really a coming together of people
and that was a starting point of that
work. I felt that this aspect of the work
would be underlined by creating a mass
of it, so I joined up about the thousand
pieces of this hair rope, so the whole
thing came to about four kilometers. The
next aspect of the work was to bring the
bumpers, because there's a contrast
between the organic material and
industrial material like a car bumper, so
the rotundity of the steel bumper the
softness of the curvature of the bumper
contrasted with a black of the hair, for
something that I said 'okay now, now it's
a question of "how do I use these two?"' and
I thought like having the steel heavy
elements being held up by the ropes was
already a certain statement about the
strength and the contrast between the
two materials, so that's how 'Behold' came about
this is an absolutely fascinating shop, I
mean the variety is immense. I basically
use things which are quite abstract and
which I don't feel will abuse its
original use. Like these for example, are like copper capsules which you wear
around your arm or on your neck and
inside will be put a rounded piece
of paper, which will have some writing to
ward off evil or whatever problems you
might be having, but in itself it's not
a sacrilegious thing to use
so, what you see here are the different stages of
the evolution of this figure but what I
found was this this one interests me
more, because this is somewhere between a
piece of wood and possibly a
representation of a person because you
see two eyes and very rudimentary ways
of carving out a figure and that's the
kind of that thing that interests me,
where form material and context come
together
the moment of transformation when
something is very definitive there's not
much more to say about it and you find
something that's in that moment of being
and not-being or becoming, I think that's
far more challenging and interesting to
actually appropriate for what you want
to say. Art cannot be a kind of an
illustration to an issue and I don't
consider art to be an agent of social
change alone. It occupies other spaces as
well and I think one of it is about the
exploration of language and the
exploration of language actually leads
you to philosophy, to aesthetics, to
cultural differences in the way we see
things or in the kind of things we
engage with. I think art is also about
how you look at things, how you evaluate
things around you
