ARTIST STATEMENT

My work reflects a distinctly diasporic consciousness. Having moved to North America at age 29, my vivid, ceramic sculptures are still very much anchored to my Indian homeland and tribe. The cross-cultural philosophy that coils through in my work is layered and ridden with moral and philosophical tensions.
East and West, tradition and modernity, the material and the spiritual straddle twin poles in dynamic compositions. Indian aesthetic sensibility – its rich heritage spanning folk and classical art – lingers in painterly rhythm. As I meander in and out of two culture systems of variably conflicting values.

In my work I try to capture “Rass". Rass or Rassa is a Hindi word that means sap of a plant or tree. I strive to get at the essence or spirit of a subject.

My approach to this body of work starts out with a sketch, a representation from memory of perhaps a herd of elephants at a watering hole, or Krishna herding cows or the warm embrace of a lost friend. I refine my initial sketches into expressive and stylistic clay shapes that are imbued with a masculine energy, all the while working with soft impressionable clay that captures deliberate and sometimes accidental impressions of my working process and retains the scarring like memory.

As I arrange the clay shapes into abstract compositions, working to support each clay shape with the next, building a strong intertwined, interdependent scaffolding like structure, working mindfully in a meditative way, embracing changes and thoughts as they manifest themselves. I look to create a sense of energy and movement with a balance of negative and positive space as the sculpture takes shape. I work to control the light that filters through the sculpture and reflects off the surface to create soft formed shadows and hard cast shadow shapes.

I use underglaze as an underpainting that will at times contrast and at times compliment and show through the top layers of colored glaze to create a rich layered and textured surface.