Curatorial Essay by Tanya Michele Amador
The Gifts of the Urban Mind
Nandita uses nature to reflect on how humans and plants connect and respond to a world filled with endless noise and pollution. Meditating on issues of globalisation, contemporary cultural values, and the environment, her work imitates the present-day biological world around us, as seen in this series, Mind(less) Wilderness. The strength of her oeuvre is palpable in her compositions, combining several separate pieces, sometimes hundreds or thousands of them, to create not just an artwork, but also to make powerful assertions.
A main thrust of Nandita’s work is that by evoking the sensation of a contemporary ecological environment through the heavy use of plastic, she employs the use irony, using the material as a metaphor for the contemporary world. With our natural world being congested with plastic and devastating our planet, she illustrates mankind’s insatiable desire to consume and dispose without thought for implications for the future. For example, in Entropic Orderswe see a layer of soft, white, flower-like shapes that mimic flora on the floor of a forest. A darker layer of material underneath illustrates old familiar conventions of ingrained principles and cultural biases that restrict our capacity to grow authentically, many of them reinforced by the constant barrage of media, a result of globalisation. Similarly, the delicate, sheath-shaped, wall sculptures, Empty Cocoon I-IIIreminds us that these societal belief systems keep us imprisoned, preventing us from attaining our full potential. However, considering the contemporary state of the world and the brain’s irrepressible capacity for rewiring, much in the same way as plants adjust to climactic and biological changes, Empty Cocoonrepresents the idea that opportunity for rebirth also exists for the urban mind. This spirit is captured in the blue, green, and brown blossom-like growth attached to the encasements, and the nest-like artworks can be interpreted as a space to be reawakened and to emerge stronger and more evolved than ever.Likewise, The Unbornarrangement offers seeds as potential for new philosophies to flourish or to stay temporarily undeveloped; the choice is ours.
In addition to plastic, shadows also play a prominent role in this exhibition. The silhouettes produced by precise lighting extend the sculptural works from their concrete forms, accentuating their ethereal beauty. Wires, ropes, and interwoven cloths connect in all directions as neural pathways. As seen in sculptures such as Home is a Blade of Grass I-IIIand Proliferation Accumulation I-II, Mukand demonstrates the multitudes of connections which exist between humans, as well as the sometimes-necessary ends of relationships. With each and every fragment coated in epoxy resin (plastic), the viewer is reminded of the weight of discontent which seems to be perpetuated through a world filled with digital clamour.
Nandita’s journey as an artist started as a painter, as many artists do. Despite her evolution into other mediums, she still maintains a strong talent for abstraction and an eye for harmonising colours. Memories of a recent Australian forest fire in the Blue Mountains further reminds the viewer of the remarkability of nature’s resilience in the diptych painting, The Balance of Heavinessandalso inHeroics of the Smallest Plant. As she articulates, through her generous brush strokes, when catastrophe strikes, vegetation eventually, and poetically, returns to the landscape. Analogously, human life forms also have the potential to fail, recover, and flourish and rise from the ashes and we are sadly reminded that many of these forest fires are man-made, such as the ones we see in Indonesia today.
This series reinforces a parallel between Mother Nature and the human mind. Maintained through the entire body of works is the appreciation that all biological creatures possess the gifts of resiliency and adaptability, a capacity for regrowth, and an ability for transformation despite the demanding and chaotic world around us.
Tanya Michele Amador, Curator
January 2019
Nandita uses nature to reflect on how humans and plants connect and respond to a world filled with endless noise and pollution. Meditating on issues of globalisation, contemporary cultural values, and the environment, her work imitates the present-day biological world around us, as seen in this series, Mind(less) Wilderness. The strength of her oeuvre is palpable in her compositions, combining several separate pieces, sometimes hundreds or thousands of them, to create not just an artwork, but also to make powerful assertions.
A main thrust of Nandita’s work is that by evoking the sensation of a contemporary ecological environment through the heavy use of plastic, she employs the use irony, using the material as a metaphor for the contemporary world. With our natural world being congested with plastic and devastating our planet, she illustrates mankind’s insatiable desire to consume and dispose without thought for implications for the future. For example, in Entropic Orderswe see a layer of soft, white, flower-like shapes that mimic flora on the floor of a forest. A darker layer of material underneath illustrates old familiar conventions of ingrained principles and cultural biases that restrict our capacity to grow authentically, many of them reinforced by the constant barrage of media, a result of globalisation. Similarly, the delicate, sheath-shaped, wall sculptures, Empty Cocoon I-IIIreminds us that these societal belief systems keep us imprisoned, preventing us from attaining our full potential. However, considering the contemporary state of the world and the brain’s irrepressible capacity for rewiring, much in the same way as plants adjust to climactic and biological changes, Empty Cocoonrepresents the idea that opportunity for rebirth also exists for the urban mind. This spirit is captured in the blue, green, and brown blossom-like growth attached to the encasements, and the nest-like artworks can be interpreted as a space to be reawakened and to emerge stronger and more evolved than ever.Likewise, The Unbornarrangement offers seeds as potential for new philosophies to flourish or to stay temporarily undeveloped; the choice is ours.
In addition to plastic, shadows also play a prominent role in this exhibition. The silhouettes produced by precise lighting extend the sculptural works from their concrete forms, accentuating their ethereal beauty. Wires, ropes, and interwoven cloths connect in all directions as neural pathways. As seen in sculptures such as Home is a Blade of Grass I-IIIand Proliferation Accumulation I-II, Mukand demonstrates the multitudes of connections which exist between humans, as well as the sometimes-necessary ends of relationships. With each and every fragment coated in epoxy resin (plastic), the viewer is reminded of the weight of discontent which seems to be perpetuated through a world filled with digital clamour.
Nandita’s journey as an artist started as a painter, as many artists do. Despite her evolution into other mediums, she still maintains a strong talent for abstraction and an eye for harmonising colours. Memories of a recent Australian forest fire in the Blue Mountains further reminds the viewer of the remarkability of nature’s resilience in the diptych painting, The Balance of Heavinessandalso inHeroics of the Smallest Plant. As she articulates, through her generous brush strokes, when catastrophe strikes, vegetation eventually, and poetically, returns to the landscape. Analogously, human life forms also have the potential to fail, recover, and flourish and rise from the ashes and we are sadly reminded that many of these forest fires are man-made, such as the ones we see in Indonesia today.
This series reinforces a parallel between Mother Nature and the human mind. Maintained through the entire body of works is the appreciation that all biological creatures possess the gifts of resiliency and adaptability, a capacity for regrowth, and an ability for transformation despite the demanding and chaotic world around us.
Tanya Michele Amador, Curator
January 2019