Corals in fumigated blacks and sultry whites by Priya Sundaravalli nestle in the sand at the entrance of Pitanga Cultural Centre at Samasti, Auroville. Inside, fragile arrangements of sea creatures, flowers and shell formations may well have been birthed by the ocean’s action. Sundaravalli’s garden grows under her ceramicist’s thumb, reflecting an irrefutable connection with organic formations. Like those fascinated with collecting seashells and pinecones, her art also forms by an intense accumulation. In this, she constantly appears to mimic the natural forces — wind, rain and sun — making currents, eroding, forming, collecting and patterning. Drawn to tribal arts, Sundaravalli admits to a raw and untamed way of making. Quite devoid of Western idioms such as clean lines and solid forms, she makes wafer-thin stoneware marked, scalloped and chiselled with imprints. There are also platters where she branches off with pictorials of a mythical lion or a car traversing uphill. As Sundaravalli’s show travels to Gallery Gitanjali in Goa opening October 9, Imprint by Shampa Shah at Artisans’ Mumbai opens on October 1. Five-time winner of the AIFACS award, Shah brings her tribal rooted aesthetics to culinary ware.
The journey of these two ceramicists is relevant to compare. They share a deep reverence for nature and their aesthetic concerns are rooted in our soil. A botanist with a forest ecology background, Shah’s tryst with ceramics started serendipitously in a class offered at Bharat Bhavan, leading her to clay, where she belonged. Her teacher, veteran artist P.R.Daroz had trained with Deborah Smith of Golden Bridge in the 1980s, returning to Bhopal; Shah was one of his first students. She worked and taught for 21 years at Museum of Man in Bhopal, an anthropology museum sprawling over 200 acres, where works of many tribal communities are exhibited. She grew fascinated with tribal myths of how the potter came into existence and the creation of the universe. Instead of documenting them as books, the museum director suggested she visualise them, so that they live on in other art forms. Shah worked with the tribal community, developing the Mythology Trail as an open-air exhibition. It was here that Tara Books from Chennai first made contact with artists like Bhajju Shyam, who later illustrated for their books. Shah’s own votive offerings emerged in Transformations, animals morphing into flowers. Her botany learning fused with impressions of terracotta horses, bulls and cows outside villages, made to appease the deity.
Like Shah, Sundaravalli took a class while studying biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan. A fluid and spontaneous process characterises Sundaravalli’s small to mid-size ceramic works. Dried out fungi, corkscrew seedpods and the fractal patterns of termite tunnels, all form her database of visual images as textures and vibrations of life for her art. Both ceramicists use whatever they find to make textures, never worrying about the right tools. Likewise, Shah says she cannot determine how exactly her visual language evolved from tribal art forms. “Every artist has a certain vocabulary and the art evolves as many permutations and combinations of that,” says Shah, who has a deep preoccupation with form and surface. Studying her marks and notations, one has an epiphany that is similar to a child learning to speak. The jumble of words start to have associations with phenomena in the landscape, but the imprint of language is already there in the human mind. These artists’ works, scoured as if out of an ancient and primeval source, make a tactile connect.
As a science teacher in Auroville, Sundaravalli taught about becoming one with the subject, a complete identification with anything we perform. She observes, “I do kolam almost every day in front of my house with turmeric and rice powder — lately, I notice they are more free and out of the box.” While Sundaravalli does not use the wheel, Shah deliberates how to break its circular throw. “It is rare for a woman to lose the idea of surrounding. I realise that when I am working on the wheel. In the movement, the hand completely takes over,” says Shah, comparing to when she draws rangoli. She recalls artist Jatin Das telling her — Shampa, don’t bother making — and concludes, “If you allow yourself, it will happen.”
(Chennai Canvas links art to design and culture through an inside look at the city)
