Overcoming Loss...

Before one touches down at any of the two airports, dinghy houses with roofs wearing plastic sheets is the first thing that one can notice. Some 100 kilometers off the metropolitan limits, Adivasis in Tansa and other protected forest areas use these very sheets as a rain cover on their bodies. Thus in the regional context, a single large sheet pf polymer is a ready-made object primarily used for protection. SmitaKinkale knows the purpose and usefulness of these sheets, and her larger artistic project has been about replacing the function, purpose and utility with an aesthetic statement.

Recent Artwork by Smita Kinkale

With her own upbringing in Tansa forest area as an Adivasi girl, she remembers moods of the forest, the many rain-flowers that punctuate meadows that go green in monsoon but would turn golden brown in October and show the bear black soil in summer. While these wildflowers and monsoon orchids could have been a part of her imagery, she chooses to negate many aspects, including the use of colour and canvas.

 

Artist : Smita Kinkale

Arguably, it is not a coincidence if a viewer, looking at Smita’s work, is reminded of Jackson Pollock’s “Lavender Mist”. Some may think of the red work as a Gulmohar or others might think of it as bougainvillea, yet others might not think of any flower but will arrive at a joy of witnessing the red abundance. Same with the blue works that delve the viewer into aquatic ecstasies, or the white works that reveal a riot of colour.

Such experience is elusive, and the presence of the material overtakes it. This is the precise moment when one arrives at SmitaKinkale's work. As an artist, she does not celebrate nature or even her past. Instead, the works seem to be asserting the human capacity of overcoming loss by reconnecting the present and absent in passage of time. 

Recent Artwork by Smita Kinkale

Smita’s art-making practice looks differently at the notions of craft and artistic intervention at one end and the conceptual context of “the ready-made” on the other. Spreading the plastic sheets on one another, welding them to make a multi-layered picture-plane and then excavating hidden layers from the picture-plane are studio processes that define her intervention that is intrinsically artistic. She chooses the layers that inform each different picture-plane, and with some defined cuts with a knife or scalpel, she operates one the picture-plane to make her clues visible. The cuts often resemble with the primitive art-making practice. A triangle is repeated not as a geometric form, but as an abstract unit that gives way to other forms. 

To be sure, the work negates bipolarity of urbane and primitive, of organic and inorganic, of presence and absence.These works pave pathways to a multi-layered experience. The works make us aware of the realms of memory and reality that cohabit

in our senses.

Abhijeet Tamhane,

Mumbai, summer 2015.