Indian artist Valsan Koorma Kolleri's works are therapeutic meditations on nature and the environment, writes Aidan Dunne.
Project's Visual Arts curator Grant Watson brought with him to the job strong links with the Indian art world, links that he has continued to develop since. Last year, with his long-term collaborator, curator Suman Gopinath, he organised a group show of Indian art, City Park. Gopinath is from Bangalore, and one of the intriguing themes to emerge from the show was the parallels to be drawn between that city and Dublin. Both have enjoyed periods of accelerated development, boom times based largely on hi-tech and service industries.
Now, for their fourth collaboration, Watson and Gopinath have co-curated a solo exhibition devoted to sculptor Valsan Koorma Kolleri, whose work, with its strong environmental concerns, is equally relevant in the context of Bangalore and Dublin.
Kolleri is an environmentalist who really practices what he preaches. One recent, ongoing project, also involving an architect and a gardener, involved the creation of a butterfly garden in the grounds of an archaeological museum in Thrissur in Kerala.
Because of the site and the circumstances, "I decided not to make any objects". There are instead beautiful architectonic forms, pathways and seating areas, in the garden. Hearing that there was a declining butterfly population, Kolleri decided to remedy that, if possible.
His exhibition includes video documentation of the garden, which is beautiful and drenched in golden sunlight. Looking at the images of trees, water and elegant structures built from honey-coloured stone, he reflects, "Now, I find it almost impossible to work against nature." His show is billed as a Retrospective, though it is not one in the conventional sense, partly because of his attitude to time, and partly because it takes the form of a meditative consideration of 30 years' work on his part, complete with a record of a slide show of that work - he is clearly a fluent, prolific artist - and other documentation, together with a huge wall drawing he has made over the last few weeks.
A quiet, self-contained man, he was born in Kerala in 1953 and studied in Madras, Baroda and Paris. The courses in the Government College of Arts in Madras were, he explains, "not only art but also craft based. It meant that you learned how to do everything yourself, including casting. It's slow. But in doing that you develop a different sense of time. You become absorbed in the task, so that it's no longer clock time, it's process time, whatever each thing involves. It was very hard work, but I believe that when you work from the heart, work for yourself, you do not become really tired. The work also sustains you, so that you feel refreshed all the time."
One of his earlier sculptural pieces consists of an oval form painstakingly woven from the coils of discarded springs. "They are from clockwork mechanisms, but they are defunct. Now everything is digital. What I had in mind was the idea of taming time. You know the expression that time is our enemy? Now more and more everything is speeding up. I'm suggesting that time need not be the enemy."
These two reflections on time could be interpreted as being almost paradoxical, encouraging industry on the one hand and wary of pragmatic materialism on the other. But Kolleri feels that we should work to our own rhythm. He returns to his point: "I really believe that when you work from the heart it is no longer hard work, and art must be made from the heart." As his slide lecture, recorded in Bangalore, attests, he has certainly worked hard, and always from his heart, judging by the way he has always being willing to move on, to make distinctly non-materialistic decisions about the direction of his work.
He smiles when I ask him if it's difficult to survive when so much of what he does must be non-commercial - certainly beyond the marketing scope of a commercial art gallery. "So far 50 years have passed and it seems to be okay for me. I have a simple life. I get cheap seats on the trains when I travel. That's okay. The climate in India means that one can be outside much of the time. I don't have a fridge, or air conditioning, but I would rather not. And I'm lucky in that I've always managed to find projects that interest me."
Looking at a selection of his work of the last 30 years, it's clear that he has a natural feeling for form and process. Initially, during his studies in the 1970s, it seemed that he might well become a mainstream minimalist sculptor, though even then his architectonic forms referred to habitable spaces. More and more he expanded his formal vocabulary to encompass organic forms in richly metaphorical works. In the 1980s he was comfortably employing found and fabricated forms with a huge range of references, deconstructing and reinterpreting the Indian art tradition with virtuosic ease, encompassing domestic and sacred artefacts, and carvings, as well as natural forms - he is immensely fond of trees.
One piece, incorporating a ladder, is a therapeutic intervention on behalf of the banyan tree. Its elevated, exposed roots are routinely severed, and the sculpture symbolises a means of reuniting tree and roots. Following heart surgery in 1992, Kolleri focused increasingly on ecological concerns and the creation of ephemeral works situated in the environment, utilising natural materials and organic pattern. He has decided not even to document his projects photographically anymore.
As his butterfly garden suggests, sometimes his sculptural practice short-circuits the separation between art and life. And he explains that his next project, back in India, will involved making drainage pits, because he's been invited to make work in an area where natural drainage has been disrupted by development. "Everything is concreted over." This he describes as, "not doing art art. Rather it's things happening and turning to art. We are part of nature anyway."
He really believes in the curative power of art in that natural sense. "The earth can solve all problems if it is allowed. Everyone is an artist, potentially, everyone is capable of doing interesting things. When you work you are on a meditational level. You silence yourself, though you are using more of your senses than you normally do. When I see the sky I become the sky, when I see water I become water. Not in a literal sense, obviously. But I mean one can reflect the mood of what you experience. When you see a material that lasts many thousands of years you can absorb that in your own mind. You can be anything. Most of the time we are looking and not really seeing.
"I think what I've learned more than anything through sculpture is to be better able to see."
Valsan Koorma Kolleri's Retrospective continues at the Project Gallery until September 4th (01-8819614)