Memories of earth, air, fire and water
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Goan artist Subodh Kerkar, who just exhibited at the Gulf Art Fair, on the philosophy behind his installations.
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MAKING WAVES Subodh Kerkar.
"I would like to think of myself as a sea artist," says Subodh Kerkar, Goa's renowned sculptor-cum-painter, who presented a special installation project at Dubai on Jumeirah beach as part of the Gulf Art Fair that culminated recently. In his installation titled `The Sea Remembers', Subodh has used old fishing crafts and mussel shells, translating them into a contemporary idiom, trying to evoke the memory of the sea. The Gulf Art Fair is a mega event organised under the patronage of Princess Haya Bint Ali Hussein, wife of Sheikh Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai. The event, which took place this past week, aims at bringing together the world's leading artists, galleries and collectors with the objective of making Dubai an important art market outside New York and London. Featuring 40 of the world's leading galleries, it was the Middle East's first major international contemporary art fair.
Speaking about his Dubai project, which was sponsored by Art India magazine, Subodh says it was about `Memories of the sea', `Memories of the boats' and `Memories of the sand'.
"What better place could I have had than Dubai to evoke memories connected with the sea, the sand and the boats!" Tracing the history of India and Dubai's "heritage of connectivity through the ocean," Subodh says he was " celebrating this connectivity, this relationship" through his sculptures at the Fair.
Maritime adventures
"My sculptures are a celebration of our mutual maritime adventures through the medium of things connected with the ocean. My installation is the celebration of maritime memory of the fishing boats," he observes, and explains that the wooden boats he uses are slowly becoming extinct and being replaced by fibreglass boats. In that sense, his installation is also an attempt to salvage a heritage. It is mixing archaeology with cultural interpretation in the context of contemporary art.
"Through my installations I am offering homage to the sea. I mix glass, copper, iron-mesh with the boats. My boats have an intrinsic memory. Of the perilous journeys made, of the carpenters' hands, the fishermen's songs, the impressions of their bodies on the surfaces, and nets loaded with fish being pulled over their edges. They must remember life in the sea and lives around the sea," explains Subodh. "Glass when heated, becomes water, solid turns into liquid, and within the womb of the boat, glass in turn remembers sand."
Living in the famous coastal village of Calangute off the north coastal belt of Goa, no wonder things associated with the sea come naturally to him.
Subodh was a doctor who gave up the medicalprofession for his passion, visual art. He received his initial art education from his artist father, Chandrakant Kerkar. By the time he was 15, Subodh could paint masterly watercolour landscapes, which he exhibited in local galleries in Goa. For the last 20 years he has been experimenting with different media. He is the
Founder and Director of the Kerkar Art Complex, Calangute, founded in 1992.
Subodh, as a student and later as a practicing doctor, was a regular illustrator and cartoonist for local and national newspapers. After completing his medical studies in 1983, he ran his own hospital for six years in Goa before taking up art full time.
"I would like to think of myself as an ocean artist. Once I open up the space I work in and take my studio to the beach, the sea becomes both my muse and my medium. I am then one with sea, the creator and the created, the mentor and the disciple," he philosophises.
"When I dig trenches in the sand and light up mussel shells on their edges, I am offering homage to the sea. I use very few manmade materials in my installations, and I use them only so long as they evoke more primal forms and elements. The boat and water, glass and sand, metal and earth. In my recent paintings too, I am looking at the elemental. In a sense, I paint my installations onto the canvas - basic geometric forms and patterns: how the earth appears from a satellite, reduced to its essence - the dots and lines of human settlements, water and earth."
His advice for today's artists: "As the saint poets once brought art to the people, away from the courts and made art of the people, today's artist too must create art in the world of the people, away from the galleries. His work must talk to them and their lives, and memories must speak through his work."
PRAKASH KAMAT
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