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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
