Sheela Gowda

Introduction

Sheela Gowda's work occupies the spaces between painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Initially trained as a painter, Gowda underwent a profound transformation in the wake of fundamentalist Hindu violence and the Bombay riots of 1992. It was at this time that she abandoned conventional forms of painting and turned to sculpture and installation. She also made a dramatic shift in her choice of materials, incorporating into her work substances and processes from traditional Indian culture such as cow dung, which has sacred implications but is also used as a domestic cooking fuel and building material, and Kum Kum, a red dye used for body adornment and rituals. Consciously blurring the line between fine art and craft, and between creative, political, and domestic spaces, she makes formal investigations into the possibilities of contemporary art while also questioning the role of female subjectivity in the often volatile mix of religion, nationalism, and violence in contemporary Indian society.

Sheela Gowda Life

Sheela Gowda, who is of Indian origin, oscillates between drawing, sculpture and installation, with an apparent concern to symbolize relationships and the suffering these may bring about when they fail. Moreover, currently living and working in Bangalore, the artist evokes the natural world through the materials she uses. Sheela Gowda's art resides within a space between the local and the global. Her sculptural installations are comprised of such simple materials as cow dung and ash, but each piece is undeniably monumental in its scale and content. Her work reflects upon the passage of time, nuances of violence, the pain of grief - concepts universally shared and understood. Yet her use of specific and indigenous media, such as tar drums used as temporary homes by road workers, or Kumkum, a red dye used for body adornment, address local concerns and lends primacy to the subaltern and a consideration of reality(www.artistpensiontrust.org).

Originally trained as a painter, Sheela Gowda made a radical shift in the 1990s. She employs unconventional materials to investigate their lowly nature, which transform into a means of subversion as well symbolize the angst and melancholy of local socio-political tensions. Her labor-intensive installations demonstrate her principle of preserving the integrity of her materials while simultaneously contending with the peculiar resistances of each. The discussant for this program is Kamala Ganesh (Cultural Anthropologist). The artist also deals with the issues of natural resources, rural life, and experiences of violence in Indian society today and seeks a kind of specificity within abstraction, avoiding overt statements while revealing meaning through subtle suggestions (www.documenta12.de).

Her early oils with pensive girls in nature were influenced by her mentor K.G. Subramanyan, and later ones by Nalini Malani towards a somewhat expressionistic direction depicting a middle class chaos and tensions underplayed by coarse eroticism. Subsequent compositions had eerie and sensual female presence in the organic world permeated by a sense of instinctual cruelty. Sheela Gowda received a Diploma in Painting at Ken School of Art (1979) which was followed by a one year non collegiate study at M.S.University, Baroda (1980) ...