Artist and researcher Chantal Jumel requested Charles Malamoud, a Sanskrit scholar from France who has deep knowledge about the Vedas , to write the introduction to her first book on kolams . Malamoud surprised Jumel by writing about the earth. “He said that human beings are burying their lies in the earth,” says Jumel, noting how the earth supports us but we mistreat it. Every day, we discard hundreds of plastic bags, batteries, gadgets and materials that are not easy to obliterate. These concerns have been a part of recycling and upcycling in design and the arts, many times, with the creative play of light bringing us to deliberate over its rather elusive nature. We are perpetually bathed in light and travelling in time, but we cannot grasp light and time directly the way we grapple with the physical earth.
Containing light and employing its properties to draw energy, highlight, scatter, reflect, spill over, flow and bounce has always held our fascination. We explore these phenomena of light to manipulate effects through materials and architecture. Here, a thrill ensues, equal to the physicist’s investigation of the dual nature of light, particles and waves, subatomic worlds and vast universes. Light travels and the effect of light is always over time, even if we do not perceive it in that manner. The shifting angle of the sun changes our experience of space through the day. Yet, when we create lighting artificially, it is usually a fixed light source, rarely conceived of as moving.
Several artists from Auroville have attempted to contain light and then almost mould it for special effects. At Auroville, French artist Marie-Claire Barsotti makes translucent figures of acrylic glass, pigments and transparent resins; at a recent show she displayed ‘Wanderer’ , ‘Free Tibet’ and ‘Dancers’. Fashioned like garden ornaments, Barsotti’s sculptures look fairly nondescript and you may just pass them by until you place a tea lamp within their hollow insides. All at once, they start to glow as if possessed with life, showing delicate wrinkles of fabric and earlier unseen expressions.
Torkil Dantzer brings light into sculpture to express concerns about how we treat the earth. A Danish economist, mathematician and designer based in Auroville, Dantzer worked to care for thousands of fallen trees during the Thane cyclone in 2011. The notion of a decayed object coming back to life is embodied in ‘Blackburned Tree of Life’, a hollow acacia Dantzer picked up, which he then burnt black and polished. Dantzer then painted the inside of the tree gold, and within its hollow, he placed a powerful light. The tree was in this way brought back to life, in some form. For Dantzer, this ‘Black Tree of Life’ is symbolic of how we treat nature, as we go through the motions of destruction and resurrection.
Korean-born Ok Jeong Lee works with upcycling art and she uses plastic bags, waste plastic and compact discs. Discarded CDs form the shiny scales of Ok’s fish. Above, suspended from the ceiling, jellyfish made of plastic with light bulbs within give out an ethereal luminosity. Ok Jeong Lee brings us a peculiar factoid, “Jellyfish are invading our shores,” she says, making a suggestion with her art that perhaps the ‘jellyfish bloom’ is because the sea creatures mistake the plastic bags we discard for other jellyfish. The ‘moon jellyfish swarm’ caused a nuclear power plant shutdown in Sweden in 2005.
In Bangalore, Jenny Pinto, a former filmmaker, started to work with handmade papers, shaping it organically to create objects and light sculptures. Pinto salvages agricultural and craft waste to recycle fibres of banana, sisal, mulberry and various river grasses. She explores the beauty of the textures, the translucence of the paper through the play of shadows in poetic expressions. But primarily, for her, this activity connects her to the earth. The whole process of sculpting film time is brought to a material life. Light is made from the earth, strangely, to reflect on our relationship with our planet and to remember the fragile and transient qualities of which we are a part.
