Recent works by Shilpa Joglekar
27th January - 1st February 2009
Travancore Art Gallery,
Travancore House Kasturba Gandhi Marg,
New Delhi- 110001.

Artist Statement
Living in this urban chaos, filled with endless experiences and enormous pressures, facing them from the wake of dawn till the tiring and taxing night, crammed with countering and confl icting relationships, catching up and then keeping up with the pace, the heart beat of the metropolis, a heavy burden makes you want to shout and question your very reason for being a part of this, succumbing to that which one would have never previously envisioned one giving in to.

I am feeling bottled up like a jar filling up to the brim and then spilling over.

When the spilling begins, the process unfolds by a feeler, a tentacle or pair of antennae that is sent out to silently seek answers through the journey of building these sculptures and paintings, my fi ngers giving these forces of nature that I have never truly been removed from a voice.

The seed becomes a metaphor, an object that embodies the gap between death and life, a growth and expansion contained, life on pause. It becomes the container of content that is itself contained in the form and genetic code of the plant from which it dropped. An eggshell tray with ceramic seeds – the durable and sustained potentiality of sprouting in to existence clad with the rags of the fragile and assembled as if it were to be couriered and set in a wooden box. The tray that would serve to carry the eggs of a living breathing chicken housed now through a pre meditated design, so as to facilitate convenience and the culture of consumerism.

This very world around me is entrenched in this endless stream of false, fake and synthetic media. It is extremely exhausting and one starts yearning for something that is real, that which sprang from the mud and is sometimes ephemeral. At this point I begin making enlarged paper sculptures, clay pods hanging from the ceiling or trees, leaving a piece of me on this being so fi rmly rooted yet reaching up to the sky, glass bottles with entrapped ceramic cocoons or a cluster of dwellings hanging from the ceiling or on branches, the simple rusted seeds put in an aged cupboard. Nature made man and man made these containers for that which he harvests from the earth.

Colour obsesses me, to use it in a certain manner and to synchronize them with my inner needs and eventually to make paintings is how I make sure these works carry a piece of the element that is mine. I start now fi nding hiding spaces in cocoons and other forms of habitat where I can reside in a secluded mental corner like the mollusks who travel with their homes, with a can of tin on my back I identify these forms by borrowing myself to this process of regeneration, calling them biomorphic utopist dwellings.

Biomorphic Dwellings

Enlarged clay pods hanging from the ceiling or trees, leaving a piece of me on this being so fi rmly rooted yet reaching up to the sky, reminiscent of glass.

Nine months of growing

A dwelling in itself, a dwelling for nine months, you live in it and then move out, migrate into this world.

Key Container

A wooden cupboard meant to hold keys, now holding the cocoon, hanging outside the cupboard are the keys to that dwelling that cocoon.

Shilpa Joglekar