Nandita Mukand
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Collaboration Journey with Denise Schellmann, Instinc Artist in Residence from Vienna-Halfway Point!

10/21/2015

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​Halway through my collaboration with Denise Schellmann  and we are having a blast! Denise is an artist from Vienna who is doing her artist residency with Instinc in Singapore. It was just wonderful to find ourselves so much in sync regarding our attitude towards art making and the role art plays in our lives.
Since Denise's is a drawing based practice I seized the chance to develop my own drawing working with her. We were both attracted to tracing paper as a drawing medium and so we bought rolls and pads of it and set to work.
Denise at work in my studio.
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Initial Experiments Denise (above) and mine (right)
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In the first week or so we explored each other's ways of working. For example Denise started with working on 3D drawing and I started with markmaking on paper. But soon I couldn't help but crumple the paper in search of texture in the material of the paper itself. The texture experiments continued for a while – I added wax (and some other materials as well) and experimented with different weights of tracing paper (example image on the  right). 
But then i needed to mould the paper some more and see how much I could do with it. A variety of scupltures in several sizes and shapes and that's how these forms were born.
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What helped us work easily together was that spirituality and its link to biology were an integral part of Denise’s practice as well. (Yeo Shih Yun of Instinc residency has managed to match us very well.) 
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​While I was texturing and sculpting with tracing paper, Denise moved back to drawing on flat paper but  her use of colour and mark-making expanded and she also started drawing on a much larger scale. 
​A month into the collaboration we had both developed a solid body of studies (and Denise even had some finished works) that we felt we could take forward. However we felt that there was a lot to be gained from embracing the challenge of merging what we had developed into the same work. This was not easy. Every artist has her unique style, like a handwriting and trying to merge 2 different styles into the same work was initially challenging. I had to modify my textures considerably and she had to make her marks a lot bolder. But we are now at the stage where we are quite thrilled with what we are developing. The final work will take the form of an installation where we are literally "drawing into space". Many thanks to Alexis Butt at the Affordable Art Fair who has been very supportive of our endeavour in allowing us a prominent space to exhibit our installation at AAF this November.  This will be followed by a  two-person show at Instinc. (More details in subsequent blogs)
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Winter Residency in the Australian Blue Mountains

7/23/2015

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It was wonderful to be back in the Australian Blue Mountains for another residency, this time during the Australian winter. This residency was sponsored by the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery and a good portion of it was spent creating site-specific installations at the gallery. But there was enough time to explore other work as well. High on the list of priorities was my investigation of the fascinating plant life in the area.
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I was also intrigued by the powdery lichen on the tree barks and stones. Rae Bolotin (a wonderful artist who runs the residency program) and I played around with some indian pigment that had been lying around in her studio for 15 years. This became the starting point for a series of experiments in blending artificial colour onto organic materials. I tried out various colours, materials, textures as well as installation options. 
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This residency took place during the Australian winter. Experiencing winter in the southern hemisphere for the first time forced me to rethink my assumptions about how I perceive weather, seasons, the position of the sun in the sky. 
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My fellow artists-in-residence, Rhona Eve Clewes from the UK and Sarah Fuller from Canada, are photographers. Sarah taught us how to make anthotypes-prints with light sensitive material like pulped spinach, beetroot, wine.
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The walks around the area were perhaps the most productive part of this residency experience. Experiencing the beautiful sights, bird sounds and the smell of eucalyptus in the air quietened my mind. Soon creative ideas and solutions for things I had been wrestling with for some time came popping in. Things just fell in place and after a long time I was filling sketchbooks with fully formed ideas I can begin work on.

Here are some photographs from my walks...
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 (For details of my installation see my blogpost "Exploring BigCi Exhibition at the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery". Here are the links to the completed work at the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery Dead Plants Don't Grow 2 , Unknown, Unsung). 
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"Exploring BigCi" Exhibition at the Hawkesbury Regional Gallery

6/26/2015

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The “Exploring BigCi" exhibition curated by Diana Robson was a special experience for me. I was honoured to be Hawkesbury Regional Gallery's first international artist-in-residence. During the course of the installation I got to know several of the wonderful people working at the gallery . I also had the opportunity to meet with some amazing artists –Nicola Moss and Kath Fries from Australia and Claudia Leuke from Germany.
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The work for the exhibition was derived from another work I had done last year in a residency context at BigCi (photograph on the right). Adapting a site specific work to a gallery context was an interesting challenge. 
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In the first version of this work the plants were hung within a shed-like building that opens onto the forest and so the forest and its greenery are the context within which the work is seen . The plants were collected from the forest floor outside. So if I ran out of raw materials I just had to take a walk into the surrounding forests and collect some more. Creating the work in the gallery at Windsor however meant that the plants had to be collected from the Blue Mountains and transported to the gallery. It became important to ensure enough plants were collected before-hand. Also gallery installation time was limited and I had to react to the new space relatively quickly and build most of the installation within a few days. Luckily I had a lot of support from volunteers and staff to help me collect the plants, transport them as well as carry out the actual work of installation. 
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I was eager to see how I could adapt the work to respond to the gallery space. This time round I was keen to create the plant screens as though floating in space. Also instead of a single high screen, this time I layered the work by allowing the screens to be seen through each other and also by letting the plants interact with their own shadows.
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I also integrated the shadows of the work on the wall with a wall drawing and collage of plants.
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The installation “Dead Plants Don't Grow 2” and the wall drawing “Unknown, Unsung” are intended to be viewed together and to play off each other.
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 Starting from shadows, to pencil drawing, the wall drawings were made progressively stronger. They acquire colour as they move away from the shadows of the plant installation. The brilliant colours in the wall drawings are intended to balance the dense browns in the deadplant installation. To view the finished works click "Dead Plant's Don't Grow 2" and "Unknown, Unsung"
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    Nandita Mukand is a Singapore-based artist.  Her work deals with the  relationship with Nature and  spirituality from within the contemporary urban context. She employs materiality to question the impact urban life has on our experience of time and the meaning we give to our own existence.

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