Sheela Gowda

Born 1957 in Bhadravati, India Lives and works in Bangalore, India The practice of Sheela Gowda encompasses a diverse array of media including painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. The materials chosen by Gowda are particularly significant for both the atmosphere they evoke through texture, colour and smell and also their metaphoric potency. She incorporates substances that straddle their everyday presence both in urban and rural India. This includes cow dung, which has sacred implications but is also used as a domestic cooking fuel and building material; gold-leaf and ceremonial dyes used for body adornment and rituals; and domestic materials such as coconut fibre, needles, threads and cord. Gowda’s process-based work frequently blurs the boundary between fine art and craft. Across her practice, she questions the role of female subjectivity in the mix of religion, nationalism and violence that comprises contemporary Indian society. In And Tell Him of My Pain, 1998/2001/2007, Gowda pulled over 100 metres of thread through needles, and then coiled and dyed it with red kumkum (dried turmeric) fixed with gum arabic. The threads are then suspended from walls and draped across spacem so that it becomes a three-dimensional drawing. The meaning of the work is multi-layered. It refers to spice culture – traditionally part of women’s experience - as well as the textile industry, and brings to mind the pain of female domestic life in a patriarchal society. Initially trained as a painter, Gowda’s work changed profoundly in response the crisis she experienced following the fundamentalist Hindu violence and the Mumbai riots of 1992. She abandoned conventional forms of painting and turned to sculpture and installation. While she shies away from using her work to make strident statements, her recent paintings, such as Agneepath, 2006, are more political in subject, drawing on images from the media of urban unrest, conflict and tragedy. Her large-scale sculptures and installations also incorporate commonplace manufactured materials of the type salvaged and recycled by impoverished migrant workers, such as lead plumbing pipes, asphalt, plastic sheeting and metal barrels. Her monumental Darkroom, 2006, is built from metal tar-drums that are stacked unaltered or flattened into sheets. It simultaneously evokes the grandeur of classical colonnades or turreted castle and the simplicity of an ad hoc temporary shelter built by India’s road-workers. Inside the structure, the darkness is broken by tiny dots of light through holes punctured in the metal ceiling, which appear like a constellation of stars. This combination of harshness and lyricism runs through much of Gowda’s work. Gowda is also interested in the idea of material displacement as means of evoking new meaning in objects. In Ground, 2007 she collected discarded Indian grinding stones, rendered obsolete by modern kitchen appliances. She found them on the streets of Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India and a city that has undergone hyperdevelopment in recent years. She dispersed these cooking stones across Lyon during the Biennale. Having been dislocated from their original context these previously unremarkable, abandoned objects became meaningful again and a potent reminder of the speed with which age-old traditions have disappeared.  Rebecca Morrild

Sheela Gowda Darkroom, 2006