Clay in Context

Abhay Sardesai

How does one assemble the partial histories of modern and contemporary ceramic art in India? Even as the paper touches upon the connections between places (Baroda, Pondicherry, Jaipur, Delhi, among others) and people (Nek Chand, Devi Prasad, Gurcharan Singh, Ray Meeker, K. G. Subramayan, among others) that were instrumental in fostering a critical give-and-take between the enthusiasms of craft and art practices, it dwells on the presence of pottery in our everyday lives at an immediate, participatory, popular level. How un/comfortably do studio and gallery ceramic practices sit with traditional pottery practices and how do these two realms inflect each other?

A community is formed when a set of social and political variables slowly congeal to create a series of axes. A community can, at different times, be both strategically open and resolutely closed. Occupations and professions translate into guilds/groups, creating the conditions by which a community acquires a public face.

One such cohesive community sharing professional affinities is located in Kumbharwada, the Potters’ Colony in Dharavi, Mumbai, which is threatened by redevelopment today. The potter’s status, premised on the production of functional forms highlights the schism between ‘the artist’ and ‘the artisan’, raising questions about the possibilities of integrating them under one rubric. How would we choose to appreciate the creative output of non-gallery-based creative practitioners? How do we destabilize the overwrought and ossified definition of who an artist is or can be?

The research collective URBZ charts some of the ways in which the artisanal communities in Kumbharwada have explored their work and led effective collaborations by way of documenting histories and interventions. The paper also examines the practices of three significant contemporary ceramic artists and explores how their work tries to signal a persuasive exploration of collectivity and processual impulses that make and establish community life.

Savia Mahajan’s work addresses the experience of what can be called, ‘material translationality’ – using decaying natural fibers, paper and clay to play out the cyclical nature of life and death. Her recent work is marked by an apocalyptic heaviness – the ossification of a book-like object signals a lowpoint in our civilizational evolution where censorship becomes the norm and a community built on free, critical speech is riven.

Neha Kudcharkar’s Hand Job works express the pressures experienced in the relationship between the body and the earth – her objects measure the textural and volumetric transcations between skin, bones and fingers and clay in its various dispositions. What does it actually mean to be digital? Her works call out an enhanced tactility and a new alphabet of intimacy.

The organic world has been an abiding source of inspiration for Madhvi Subrahmanian. Along with the seed and the pod, experiences related to pregnancy, to birthing, have helped her explore the transforming self. Her new works present haphazard buildings bereft of people, – the idea of the ruin and the experience of atomization in today’s world leads to the teratology of a new age Gotham City with its attendant pathologies leading to an enquiry on how do we experience and measure abandonment?

Each of these artists raises questions about the new traumas of life in a post-impact world – our age marked by a re-invocation of narrow identity propositions, of asphyxiated acts of protestation and of violent modes of Othering. These are conditions that these artists as a community raise their voices against.