Madhvi Subrahmanian Mapping Memory
Madhvi Subrahmanian Mapping Memory September 07 - September 29, 2017
Upla | 2017 Porcelain, glaze, cowdung ash Site-specific | size variable
Growth | 2017 Stoneware 60 inches diameter
Mappa Mundi series (Black/White) | 2017 Stoneware 17 x 26 inches
Mappa Mundi series (orange/black) | 2017 Stoneware 28 x 33 inches
Rolling Pins | 2017 Porcelain, glaze, powder coated metal rack 48 x 18 inches Love: Luck: Life: Health: Heart : Fame
CLAY BODIES
They remember those who do not speak Nancy Adajania
Madhvi Subrahmanian’s recent ceramic sculpture-installations and assemblages mark the expansion of her studio practice into social space. At the entrance to her exhibition at Chemould Prescott Road, Mapping Memory, we come upon a small garden that seems to have blossomed around her tree sculptures. This is the outcome of an experiment, in which Madhvi invited her viewers to participate and share in her artistic labour. Responding to the invitation, they fashioned their own trees from sticks and balls of clay, in a modest workspace carved out of the exhibition area. Some of the trees aspired towards naturalism. Others were amateur delights. Yet others, like Peter Pan, were unsure whether to be a plant or a full-grown tree. These informal creations – unbaked, unglazed, ready to crumble – were placed around the composites of trees, houses and phantom roads that are the artist’s sculptural objects. While Madhvi’s gesture of hospitality was exemplary for its inclusiveness, was she also questioning the role of the ceramic sculptor in contemporary times, and charting the future direction of her practice? I would argue that a certain formalist abstractionism inheres within the art of the modern ceramicist, whether practised in India, America, or Japan. Indeed, the closer one looks at these three regions, the more strongly one is reminded that modern ceramicists in each region have been nourished by the work and thought of their colleagues in the other two – which makes for a transcultural idiom that, despite particular regional emphases, is premised on a shared taste for primordial, archetypal impulses. These grand impulses have tended to fetishize an art form whose origins lie in humble everyday materials and processes geared to melding the aesthetic and the functional. By embracing sociality, Madhvi attempts to break the spell of the studio-shaped fetish object and restore the ceramicist’s art to the circuits of everyday life, in which the viewer does not remain a passive consumer but organically contributes to the process of art-making. In her evolving practice, Madhvi has endeavoured to disturb such formalist abstraction. She has experimented with a range of processes, both formal and informal, and allowed the factor of
chance to gamble against set protocols; she is a partisan of low firing, hand-building, smoke marks, cracks, holes, cavities and surface impurities. She favours mandala-shaped assemblages, those fail-safe guarantees of holistic selfhood, but is also keen on spirals that spin away from the centre and find their own trajectories. She does not differentiate between clay and skin. She kneads and ‘grows’ seeds, pods, cones, trees; she once made a mould of her pregnant belly. Madhvi is a comrade and co-conspirator of clay; time and gravity are her adversaries. She records the shadows of arrow-shaped roads; time wipes them out. She challenges gravity; she builds high, higher, not out of hubris, but because she knows that “if you push clay against its will, it pushes right back”. * Mapping Memory presents its viewers with a contradiction: How do we apply the cartographer’s precise tools to something as slippery as what is remembered and how it is remembered? In the struggle between humankind and nature over limited resources, how does memory fare on the scorecard? If time and gravity oppose her, the artist’s obvious allies in this body of work are shadows and light, which point up the tension between naturalia and artificialia. Roads crawl up her ceramic tree sculptures, striating them with zebra crossings. In this territorial battle, the tree does not let the building forget who is the interloper. It fuses itself with the building, making love or war, depending on our vantage point. Madhvi cannot resist the magical power of the handprint, the most ancient form of presencing the human self. In adjacency with the handmade clay trees made by the viewers, she has composed a large assemblage of cowdung cakes, each one rendered in pristine porcelain, a medium described by the pioneering British potter Bernard Leach as the ‘ultimate refinement of pottery’. [1]
Detail of Upla | 2017
The sanitised coolness of porcelain is pressed with the warmth of deeply etched fingerprints, reminding us of women’s labouring hands. But is Madhvi extolling the virtues of purity, whether of the definitive expressiveness of this ceramic medium or of the sacred status of cowdung in Hindu ritual? Or, closer to the bone, is she questioning the claims of the gau rakshaks, the cow vigilantes who have in recent years brutally lynched Muslims and Dalits in the name of protecting the sacred cow. [2] The (in)organic porcelain cowdung cakes frozen on the wall by a Midas touch remind us painfully of how the cow has been fetishized by the forces of Hindu majoritarianism to incite communal and casteist tension. [3] We turn a corner: an interactive installation invites viewers to leave low-relief word-prints on a bed of sand. Using porcelain rolling pins, we roll out a utopian future where ‘luck’ and ‘love’ will not fail us. Along with the words, a recurring fingerprint makes its presence on the sand. Does it belong to Madhvi who, like the prehistoric shamans, is leaving her mark as an artist-healer on her work? *
Rolling Pins | 2017 | Porcelain, glaze 4 x 18 inches Love: Fate: Give: Live: Health: Wealth
Madhvi knows that the world is too vast to be moulded into decipherable shape with her migrant fingers. Over the years, she has called three continents home, living variously in India, Singapore, the USA, and Germany. In her sculptures, she turns cartography into fiction, which perhaps is the only real way home. Her personalized maps of her past and present itineraries in Singapore and Bombay are installed like shields on the wall: protective gear to ward off the caprices of memory. In the manner of a kintsugi artist transforming a crack into an epiphany, she uses gold to fill and
Mappa Mundi series | 2017 | Terracotta with gold leaf | 17 x 35 inches
line her memories of journeys made and cul-de-sacs overcome. Amidst the smoke marks and kintsugi cracks on the map-shields, we recognise familiar signs: Bombay’s archipelago of seven islands and the grey concrete tiles paving its forever-under-construction roads. The clay that stains and covers the ridged lines carries its own cultural semiotics: an orangeish hue alludes to Singapore; a deep red recalls the pots of Dharavi, a large informal settlement in Bombay that is home to a well-respected Kumbharwada, a potters’ colony. As compared to the Singapore map-shields, the Bombay map-shields seem to have more detail, and mimic the chaos of the populous city in their density. Might this happen because the artist no longer lives in Bombay, and therefore tries to recall the city with a haptic force she need not assert in her daily Singapore life? Or could it be that Madhvi’s private cartography of Singapore has instinctively picked up on the authoritarian impulses of what Cherian George calls the ‘air-conditioned nation’? [4] In Singapore, where everything is in place and sanitized, the ratio of exposure to concealment is very different from a city like Bombay where the broken, the ungoverned and the ungovernable operate in plain sight. What makes these map-shields such a tantalizing Mnemosyne is the friction between the lyrical abstraction on their surfaces – the smoke marks, varying with their treatment, remind us strongly of soot-coloured Bombay walls or silken Rothko stains – and the sculptural objects themselves, which are anything but ephemeral or spectral. In fact, they have an air of being unbreakable, dreaming of immortality. * When the trees cast their soft shadows outside Madhvi’s studio in Singapore, the road looks like
a perspective drawing. Only she knows that its desire to recede smoothly in space must remain unfulfilled. In a Rorschachian move, she twins the photograph of the incomplete road again and again, to retain the illusion of continuity.
Reclaiming the Road | 2017 | Black & white digital print in light box
When light falls on her earthen buildings, they cast the surprising shadows of trees. A sculpture becomes a dense sketch, an ephemeral wall drawing. A floor plan suffers from a genealogical quandary: Is it an excavated civilization, the aerial view of a metropolis, or a city slowly turning into an archaeological site unbeknownst to its greed-afflicted denizens? Elsewhere, Madhvi’s enigmatic shadow theatre – light gliding on a conveyor belt – turns generically constructed buildings into caricatures, distorted bodies swaying to a danse macabre. The stridulating cricket sounds in the background, which are made by the scraping of the insects’ wings, add to the dystopian atmospherics of the work (on sensing a threat to their habitat, male crickets are known to become extremely aggressive and make the most belligerent sounds). Hollowed out, evacuated of human presence, do these ruins of a post-industrial landscape embody her account of the ravages of the Anthropocene era? Yet we humans must reclaim our redemptive agency. While exiting the gallery, we return to the artist’s foremost proposition. By contributing trees to the project, the viewers have renewed their sense of participation and belonging. And so, the artist has mapped a ground of trust, distributing the collective potentialities of affect and creative energy through the white cube. *
Floor Plan | 2017 | Red and Black Stoneware | 22 x 22 inches each
The Clay-Wide-Web: An Unwritten History “[Trees] are inextricably social beings. Under the ground all trees are supported by symbiotic fungal partners. The tree supplies the fungus with sugars, the fungus attracts minerals from the soil and filters them into the trees’ roots. The complexity of this networking is only now being uncovered… The fungal network also acts as a conduit for sharing information about water availability and attacks by predatory insects, to the extent that it has been nicknamed ‘the wood-wide-web’.” [5] The incredible chemical messaging system of the ‘wood-wide-web’ has become a source of great inspiration and curiosity for Madhvi lately. On thinking about the specific dialect in which trees communicate with each other, I began to think of an analogous situation: How may we identify the various dialects of the art of ceramics in the Indian context? Why is it that when, and if, on the rare occasion that we historicize contemporary Indian ceramic art, we invariably present a defensive position for it vis a vis the fine arts tradition, or make a cursory nod to the Arts and Crafts movement of the 1880s, which is only one of its many genealogies (moreover, this movement born in industrialised Britain was articulated through regional variations in America, India, Scandinavia and Japan)? Rather than shadowboxing with the fine arts, we need to look at contemporary Indian ceramic art’s own rich and complex history of apprenticeship to more than one ceramic tradition, and the sculpting of its own transregional language. On studying Madhvi’s pedagogical itinerary, [6] I encountered a range of transcultural entanglements and affinities that have nourished her practice, and which deserve narration and analysis. As a college student in the early 1980s, she enrolled herself in a part-time pottery course at Bombay’s Sophia Polytechnic, even while studying Commerce and Economics at her parents’ behest. In the mid-1980s, at Golden Bridge Pottery (GBP) in Pondicherry, run by American ceramicists Deborah Smith and Ray Meeker, Madhvi learned to make wood-fired pottery by entering into the “skin of the material.” [7] As a student there, she had to acquaint herself with the function of the raw materials – silica, feldspar, Ball clay, China clay – that constituted a clay body and the glaze. “I studied various clays from different parts of India for their colour and shrinkage individually, as well as tested them in a composed clay body.” Smith ran the production pottery wing at GBP and Madhvi admired her strict standards regarding weight, size and form. But the students were not expected to make work like GBP. While Meeker from whom she learnt functional pottery held them to those high standards, he also gave them the freedom to explore the endless possibilities of the art of ceramics.
Artist with Ray Meeker at Golden Bridge Pottery, 1985
After GBP, Madhvi wasn’t done with learning the craft. Like an Indian classical singer, she apprenticed herself to various gharanas of ceramic art, tuning into different temperatures of firing and glazing, boning up on rigour but also being entertained by the teacher’s idiosyncrasies; all the time imbibing a variety of ways to perceive the world through cognition and intuition. During a summer workshop at the Peters Valley School of Craft, New Jersey, in 1990, led by the American potter Warren MacKenzie, she continued to practice functional pottery and learned to perfect the Zen-like art of repetition, a way of overcoming the distractions of the conscious mind. MacKenzie’s approach was philosophical; his strength lay in “allowing yourself to see.” Madhvi reminisces how he anthropomorphized his pots by speaking of “the foot of the pot or the lip of the bowl.” She possesses three pots of this supremely accomplished ‘Mingei-sota’ potter – MacKenzie coined this deliciously hybrid term by mixing Mingei, the Japanese folk art tradition founded on the belief that beauty lies in simple handmade objects and that aesthetics and functionality are not antithetical to each other, with ‘Minnesota’, the city where he built his kiln and taught at university. [8] At the Meadows School of the Arts in Texas, Madhvi received a holistic education in the arts, breaching the boundaries between fine arts and ceramics. She learned “the canons of a good pot’ from her teacher Peter Beasecker, who is known for his refined porcelain works. He never restricted her in any way, but a certain restlessness had crept into her practice. On the one hand, there was the expectation of a unique Indian sensibility in her work (the spectres of Orientalism cannot be chased away entirely). On the other hand, Madhvi was herself wrestling with the lack of the manifestation of “a unique me” in her work. While at Meadows, her trip to New Mexico, where she attended a summer school, set her neurons firing again. The stunning desert landscape, the ancient adobe Pueblo Indian settlements, and the elegant grey and white Anasazi pottery, cast a spell on her. “It was as if New Mexico connected me to my own tradition.” Madhvi was trained in high-fired stoneware at GBP. However, her emergent
interest in low firing, handbuilding techniques drew her like a magnet to Anasazi pottery. This experience strengthened her resolve to work with terracotta/earthenware and smoke firing – although terracotta has been conventionally and mistakenly considered low down in the hierarchy of ceramic art as compared to say porcelain and stoneware. As she extracts long-forgotten details from her memory bank, the holes in her ceramic sculptures begin to make new sense. The excavations of Anasazi mortuary rituals indicate that they would paint their pots with vibrant human, animal or geometric images and then ‘kill’ them by making a hole with a sharp tool. They would put this pot with the ‘kill holes’ on a dead person’s head so that her/his spirit would find a release. The holes in Madhvi’s pots, as I wrote earlier, help break the spell of formalist abstraction. But perhaps they do more than that: they promise freedom from the dogma of achieved protocols. If an artist wishes to practise an art form that retains much of its primodial force even in its contemporary avatar, something has to give for the air to circulate anew .
Smoke fired bowl | 8 x 16 inches | 1991
During their hikes into the mountains of New Mexico, Madhvi and her fellow students would often come upon Anasazi pottery shards lying around on hillocks. She has preserved a few fragments. We find other faraway traces in Madhvi’s works. Georgia O’Keefe had made New Mexico her home in her later years. The haptic deserts and mesas of Santa Fe and Taos make an appearance in O’Keefe’s paintings as tumescent skin folds, mortal and immortal all at once. As we pedal backwards into Madhvi’s works, we sense O’Keefe’s eroticism and humour coming through. Like O’Keefe, Madhvi has not fought shy of revealing erogenous zones in her work: we find an unabashed reveling in the linga and the yoni shapes camouflaged as anthills, pods, cones, flowers and arrows.
Madhvi’s self-education has taken her on a deltoid journey from GBP to American pedagogy, which is itself inflected with Japanese borrowings, and Native American erasures, and onwards to Dharavi and Manipur. We could place Madhvi’s encounters with hand-built Anasazi pottery alongside the work of potters in Dharavi who, as the artist puts it, “throw the pot with a hole at the bottom and then beat it to get the beautiful and ubiquitous round bottoms seen in matkas all over India.” Incidentally, Anasazi pots were made by women. Disappointed with traditional taboos against menstruating women touching the potter’s wheel in India, Madhvi was thrilled to come across the work of Manipuri women potters – who sidestep this restriction, shaping the pot with their hands with a wet rag while circling around it, in the process transforming themselves into the potter’s wheel. [9] I ask Madhvi about ceramicists Gurcharan Singh and Nirmala Patwardhan, who are not mentioned in her bio-data, but with whom she is likely to have crossed paths. As it happens, she is the proud owner of Singh’ gorgeous blue-glazed cups and has spent time at his Delhi Blue Art Pottery where he was endearingly addressed as ‘Daddyji’. A pioneer of studio pottery in India, he met Leach and Yanagi when he studied ceramics in Japan between 1919 and 1922. The ‘Persian Blue’ glaze tiles have travelled along the Silk Route from Iran to Isfahan to Samarkhand, to Kabul and Peshawar, to India. This luminous glaze would have disappeared into history’s black hole had it not been for Singh’s timely intervention to revive it and give it a new lease of life at his Delhi Blue Art Pottery. Patwardhan, who grew up in Japan and had also worked with Leach in the UK, has left an incalculable legacy for ceramicists. Her systematic manual of glaze recipes, the Handbook for Potters (1984) is a first in the Indian context. Patwardhan often visited Madhvi’s studio, especially when she was firing her wood kiln. Madhvi remembers her as a “generous soul” who shared her knowledge and experiences readily. Whether it was press moulding the skirting of the British ceramic artist Kate Malone’s installation, or making origami forms with very hard paper and using them as moulds at the American ceramicist William Daley’s retreat, Madhvi found herself sometimes overstimulated, and at other times emptied out, by each new experience (Daley would instruct his students: “Let the subconscious trickle in.”). But she never remained unprovoked. It is a human tendency to charge forward into the future and leave behind that, which has become redundant; but it is equally true that we circle back to things we have rendered obsolete by our departures. While preparing for an installation that will be displayed at the Indian Heritage Centre Museum in Singapore, Madhvi feels like a student again. She has spent weeks making the same cup again and again, in a return to her GBP days, when she learned to make functional pottery. Only, this time, the reasons are not wholly aesthetic or functional, but political. She has literally
found a measure to comment on the immeasurable horror of colonized populations forced into indentured labour. The trigger for this installation is a rubber-tapping cup that Madhvi found in the museum’s collection; such cups were made by the Chinese and used by the Indians on the Britishowned plantations in colonial Malaya to collect the dripping latex from cuts made in the bark of the rubber tree. Madhvi’s installation consists of hundreds of such cups, all the same size but each distinctive in some way – chromatically, by way of pattern, and in the style of display. Each cup fixed to the wall might be identical – but isn’t. Just like the labourers, who were uniformly poor, but were individuals in their own right, dreaming their separate dreams.
*
Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and curator based in Bombay. She is the editor of the transdisciplinary anthology ‘Some things that only art can do: A Lexicon of Affective Knowledge’ (Raza Foundation, 2017) and the author of The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf (The Guild Art Gallery, 2016). Adajania taught the curatorial practice course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts (2013 and 2014).
Ode To The Unknown | Indian Heritage Centre | 2017 - 18
Notes
1. See Bernard Leach, A Potter’s Book (London: Faber and Faber, 1940), p. 38. 2. In the 2015 Dadri lynching case, Mohammad Akhlaq was beaten to death and his son Danesh was assaulted for allegedly possessing and consuming beef. See ‘Dadri Lynching: One year on, what has changed after Mohammad Akhlaq was beaten to death?’ on FirstPost, Sept. 28, 2016. Retrieved from www.firstpost.com/india/dadri-lynching-one-year-on-what-has-changed-after-mohammad-akhlaq-was-beaten-todeath-3023850.html 3. See Sakshi Dayal and Sanjeev Verma, ‘Two ‘beef transporters’ forced to eat cowdung by gau rakshaks’ in the Indian Express, June 29, 2016. Cow vigilantes of the Gau Rakshak Dal in Haryana force-fed Rizwan and Mukhtiar, who they claimed were beef transporters, a concoction of cowdung, cow milk, cow urine, milk and ghee to “teach them a lesson and also to purify them.” 4. See Cherian George, Singapore:The Air-Conditioned Nation, Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 19902000 (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2000). 5. Richard Mabey: ‘We are finally waking up to the secret life of trees’ in the Financial Times, May 21, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/9033ea4e-1e84-11e6-b286-cddde55ca122 6. Priya Maholay-Jaradi has initiated a biographical framing of Madhvi’s practice in her essay, ‘Contextualising Madhvi Subrahmanian’s Sculptures in Clay in a Global Cultural Economy’, exh., catalogue (Chemould Prescott Road, Bombay, 2010). 7. Regarding the beginnings of GBP, Madhvi writes: “Deborah had spent a year in Bizen, a region of Japan where pots are fired without glaze, allowing the wood ash its play on the surface of the work. Ray’s influences lay in 1960s abstract expressionism and California funk. In the southern India of 1971 both these directions seemed irrelevant. They settled on making functional stoneware with a Japanese/American aesthetic.” See Madhvi Subrahmanian and Sharbani Das Gupta, ‘Foreword’ in ‘Traditions Evolving: Golden Bridge Pottery and Contemporary Ceramics from India’, exh., catalogue (NCECA, Houston, 2013), p. 3. 8. A further art-historical annotation is necessary here. When he was studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, MacKenzie discovered Leach’s seminal A Potter’s Book (1940), which was based on his interactions with some of Japan’s most illustrious artist-craftsmen and philosophers, who taught him technique, but also generously shared their life-world or Lebenswelt with him. In 1950, MacKenzie apprenticed himself to Leach. By the time he had met Shoji Hamada and Soetsu Yanagi in 1952, he was already familiar with Hamada’s works, having seen them in Leach’s collection.Yanagi, Hamada and Leach were the co-founders of the Mingei movement, which developed during the 1920s and 1930s in Japan. They bemoaned the disappearance of simple objects made by anonymous craftsmen and used by ordinary people during the Edo and Meiji periods. The Mingei movement was, in turn, inspired by Ruskin and Morris’s ideas of craftsmanship endangered by the forces of industrialisation, and socialism. By assisting MacKenzie, Madhvi had tapped osmotically into a complex history of Orientalism, appropriation, and transcultural collaboration. 9. See Shampa Shah’s essay on the Manipuri woman potter Neelamani Devi in Jyotindra Jain ed., Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India (Delhi: Crafts Museum and The Handicrafts and Handlooms Exports Corporation of India Ltd., 1998), pp. 61-69. Shah analyses Neelamani’s practice, not only in the context of traditional myths and legends, but also emphasising her agency in reinventing the tradition “with her personal discernment, insight and sensibility.” (p. 66) Coincidentally, Shah also singles out Neelamani’s desire to manipulate smoke stains on her pots to create her “personal aesthetic vocabulary” (p. 67). Here, again, she circumvented the traditional ideas related to the inauspiciousness of smoke stains or their ability to thwart the evil eye. I mention this particularly to make a connection with Madhvi’s incorporation of smoke stains in her ceramic sculptures and, as a corollary, to emphasise the fact that so-called traditional and contemporary pottery practices should not be seen as binary opposites. *
Germination | 2017 Stoneware, glaze 72 inches diameter
Mappa Mundi series (green/blue) | 2017 Stoneware, gold dust 14 x 35 inches
Mappa Mundi series (green /red) | 2017 Earthenware and gold dust 35 x 17 inches
Mappa Mundi series (7 islands) | 2017 Earthenware, smoke-fired terra sigillata and gold dust 37 x 34 inches
Mappa Mundi series | 2017 Earthernware, smoke-fired terra sigillata and gold dust 20 x 40 inches diameter
Mappa Mundi series Earthenware, terra sigillata, smoke - fired, gold dust 20 x 16 inches
Mappa Mundi series: Green | 2017 Earthenware, gold dust 18 x 45 inches
In the Shadow of the Trees | 2017 Stoneware and light size variable
Forest | 2017 Stoneware, glaze size variable
Earth’s Whispers | 2016 Stoneware, earth, moving light & sound size variable
Madhvi Subrahmanian SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2017
Mapping Memory, Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai Ode to the Unknown, Indian Heritage Center, Singapore
2012
Absorbing Japan, Japan Creative Center, Singapore
2011
Connections, Indigo Blue Art Gallery, Singapore
2010
Organic/Abstract, Lacoste Gallery, Concord, MA, USA
2010
Organic/Abstract, Chemould Prescott Road Mumbai, India
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2017
From the Ocean to the Silver City, Australian High Commision, Singapore Mutable:Ceramics and Clay Art in India since 1947, Piramal Museum of Art. Mumbai Here Lie Dragons and Other Coded Landscapes, Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai
2016
Cont(r)act Earth, Ceramic Biennale, Henan Museum, China Tree of Life, Ayala Museum, Manila, Philippines. Luminous, Gallery Nvya, New Delhi, India Across the Table, Across the Land, NCECA, Kansas City. Ceramic View: international exhibition at National Gallery Bangkok, Thailand
2015
Chawan International Exhibition, Belgium Unfolding Perspective, The Deck, Singapore Six by Six, India / Australia collaborative show, Australian Triennale, Canberra, Australia Indo - Korean Contemporary Ceramic, Inko, Chennai, India Raindrops, Playeum, Gillman Barracks, Singapore
2014
India Art Fair, New Delhi, India Shoe Box Sculpture, Singapore / Taiwan Bridges, Stainless gallery, New Dehli, India 3rd Jakarta Contemporary Ceramic Beinnale, Jakarta, Indonesia 8th Naori Eco- Art Festival, South Korea
2013
India Ceramic Museum, FuLe International Ceramic Museum, Fuping, China The Black Frame Project, Indigo Blue Art Gallery, Singapore The Bucket Show Forum Art Gallery, Chennai, India Traditions Evolving, NCECA. Houston TX, USA 4th ASNA triennale, Karachi, Pakistan
PUBLIC ART INSTALLATIONS 2017
Singapore Night Festival, Singapore
2016
Art Ichol, sculpture garden, Ichol, Madhya Pradesh, India
2015
St Regis Hotel,Vommuli, Maldives Cocoon and Tree houses at Villa Shanti, Ubud, Bali
2014
Ahead, installation part of Drive Public art project at Gillman Barracks Threesome, a sculptural bench Dhoby Ghaut, Singapore, Singapore Furniture Ass
2013
India Ceramic Museum, Fule international Ceramic Museum, Fuping, China
2012
Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Shigaraki, Japan JSW Foundation, Karnataka, India
2011
Mumbai Airport Authority, Domestic Terminal
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS: Cover Art India,Volume XIX, Issue IV 2015 Figures of thought; Objects of Experience - Priya Maholay-Jaradi, Art India, 2015 Paper Clay Art and Practice by Rosette Gault Univ of Penn press, PA USA 2013 Revista Ceramica: Madhvi Subrahmanian: La Nueva ceramic de la India, Antonio Vivas issue 126, 2012, pg 85 (Int/Spain) Ceramics Art and Perception:Visible Roads Invisble Bridges,Issue 83, 2011(Int/Australia) Neuve, Ceramics: A Homecoming Residency, September/October 2010 (Int/Germany) Art India, The Next Journey, review by Sharbani Dasgupta, June 2010 (Int/India) Contemporary Ceramics by Cooper Emmanuel. Published by Thames and Hudson, England 2009 Smoke Firing-Contemporary Artists and Approaches, Jane Perryman, published by A&C Black, England 2009
Thank You Shireen Gandhy for her support and for believing in my work. The amazing team at Chemould that knows how to stay calm through the heavy monsoons and put a good show together. Rupal Shah,Vithal Solankar, Firdosh Antia, Sameeruddin, Naina Baria and Shaleen Wadhwana for their tireless efforts in installing the show and their keen eye for detail. Ambica Beri of Art Ichol for generously allowing me to produce some of the works at her studio. My parents Jaya and Keshavsinh Kapadia from whom I draw all my inspiration and strength. My husband Ramesh and kids Ananya and Shiv for their unconditional love and encouragement.
Acknowledgments Essay: Nancy Adajania Photography: Anil Rane and Ajit Patel Photo credit: Indian Heritage Centre Resource Library, Singapore Catalouge Design: Janhavi Shirwadkar
Š 2017 Madhvi Subrahmanian and Chemould Prescott Road All rights reserved around the world. No part of the text of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers. All rights for reproduction or transmission of the artwork in the publication, in any form, electronic, mechanical or otherwise remain with the artist.
Tree of Life | 2017 Stoneware 14 X 11 x 6 inches | 14 x 7 x 2.5 inches
Queens Mansion, 3rd Floor, G. Talwatkar Marg, Fort, Bombay 400 001, India Tel.: +91 22 22000211 / 12 email: gallerychemould@gmail.com website: www.gallerychemould.com Cover page: Mappa Mundi series (7 islands) | 2017