The Mnemonic Art of Subodh Kerkar
Sabitha. T.P

Subodh Kerkar is an artist who effortlessly translates tradition in a contemporary idiom. He evokes the indigenous in his contemporary sculptures and installations that use parts of used boats, rope, mussel shells and palm leaves. His long association with the sea in Goa, where his artist-father used to take him to the beaches in his childhood, and where he learnt to observe the play of light that is crucial to a lot of his work fusing wood with lit glass, has been his constant inspiration and point of aesthetic reference.

His artistic intervention in landscape, he says, was initially accidental. About the origin of his first series of installations, Tenth Planet (2002),he has this to say: “I had worked for some years creating innovative lamps in copper and tin.  I had made a few copper bowls, about a meter in diameter, as part of a lamp I was working on. One evening I put these bowls in my jeep along with some electrical cable and headed for the beach. We dug two craters in the sand, covered them with the copper bowls with electrical bulbs underneath them, and ran the cable under the sand to a beach shack which obliged us with an electrical connection.  I switched on the lights and was stunned! I was looking at a mysterious effect on the seashore.” His works also offer a critical comment on accidentality. Many of his installations that use shells on the beach are artistic reflections on the ephemeral and the accidental.

Subodh Kerkar acknowledges his intellectual debt to artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long in memorializing the transient. In a work titled Rice goes for a Walk (2005), where he plants rice saplings in a zigzag manner in a children’s park in Panjim, Goa, Kerkar pays homage to Goldsworthy who memorializes walks with artistic intervention in his landscape art-works. Goldsworthy’s and Long’s works were definitive of a certain moment in the history of landscape that brought to reflexive fruition the American Land Art movement of Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer who intervened directly in the mythical Western American landscape as a critical interrogation of Abstract Expressionism.

Subodh Kerkar’s work, while acknowledging the artistic debt to earlier artistic practices that brought art out of the museum to public spaces, adds to it the poetic evocation of specific sites and material genealogies with locally sourced as well as used media. If palm leaves, rice saplings, bamboo and used boats bring together lived life and art, mussel shells and sand evoke the sea that is definitive of Kerkar’s work. The sea becomes internal as well as external, material as well as metaphor in a dramatic encounter between the mythical and modern. This deep indigenous element in his work can be said to be the signature of his art.

If landscape artists often erase the political in service of the picturesque, Subodh Kerkar infuses the picturesque and the decorative with the political. Celebrations (2004), with irkali sarees hung on rows of trees along the road in Saligao, was an interventionist attempt to call the attention of political authorities to the plight of marginalised migrant agricultural labourers most of whom are women. Metamorphosis (2004), in which he covered trees with newsprint, too alerts the viewer to the urgent issues of deforestation and the dangerous consumption of nature’s resources. Kerkar is sensitive to the political potential of his work as a form of art that takes itself out of the museum to the people. His work, arresting in its dimension, invites the viewer to be a collaborator. It is not a work of art that is encased in museums and creates boundaries for touch. Kerkar’s works of art make themselves in the midst of people, with familiar and associative material such as rocks, mussel shells, cow dung and palm leaves.

From the early days when he used to do realist watercolours, Kerkar says that he had a fascination for the play of light and shade. This fascination has stood him in good stead as we see him arranging luminous and dark areas in his installations and sculptures, some of which use lit glass as a medium. In the installation Mussel Waves (Busan, Korea, 2006), he evokes light and shade with the choreographic intermingling of the dark exteriors of mussel shells with their white interiors. The lit trenches in Memories of Sunset on Sand (Bombay, 2004) and Sea Anemones (Goa, 2005) are a metaphor for the ephemeral play of light as much as are the installations in clay with cut out figures of men and women which poetically evoke the moon and its soft, diffused light.His installations continue to reflect this wonder of light and shade. The series of sculptures titled Memory of a Boat (2006-07)uses parts of wooden boats and lit glass in which there is a dramatic juxtaposition of the darkness of wood with the translucence of glass and  the rough texture of the boat with the smoothness of glass.

Another lingering feature of Kerkar’s work is the use of the elliptical form. This is most pronounced in his paintings and sculptures. The elementary elliptical form brings forth resonances of the boat, fish, and yoni or female genitalia considered a creative source in Hindu mythology. The motif of the fish echoes as well with Hindu iconography and popular artistic practices such as the patachitra in Bengal. Kerkar’s art  abounds with forms and material that are borrowed from lived life as well as the environment of the sea in Goa. Kerkar says that the sea, with its suggestion of infinity as well as mutability, has been his guru. Growing up in Goa with its many beaches, he spent much of his time in childhood watching the sea transform through the day, and watching too, the lives in and around the sea.

The works currently on display, Marine Icons reflect this deep artistic and intellectual association with the sea. The sculptures with parts of used boats with rope, tar, acrylic and mirrors evoke the indigeneity of Kerkar’s art which is, at the same time, profoundly contemporary in its idiom. The use of mirrors plays with the wonder of mutating light and reflectivity while the rope and tar intermingle with the boat in a materially contiguous manner. Marine Icon also sanctifies the profane, thus attributing to everyday objects such as a fishhook or rope, the aura of the sacred. The drawings, which are mutations of objects associated with the sea, “take the line for a walk” as the master of line, Paul Klee, would say.

Memory is the leitmotif of much of Kerkar’s artwork, be it the line remembering certain forms or the surface of the boat remembering the many voyages and the proximity of water. Water is both elemental and metaphorically evocative in his work. And with material and form subliminally gesturing towards the sea, the viewer is invited on board this voyage into the layered memories of the sea. In a dramatic encounter of tradition - both artistic and lived - and contemporaneity, where elementary form contrasts with rich material, Subodh Kerkar’s mnemonic art pays a perennial homage to the vital genealogy of the sea.