Nandita Mukand
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Flowers with their own stories

7/10/2017

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Excerpt from the OpenART 2017, Sweden Biennale catalogue
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​The catalogue shares some of the stories behind the flowers that were contributed for my installation "Blossom Flourish Wither Perish"

"....Used items carry memories. They have a history, some more clear than others, says Kerstin Wagner, assistant curator, and then shares a special story.
A woman came to the office at Kopmangatan and dropped off an IKEA bag filled with dried flowers. The flowers turned out to be gifts from her late husband and other gifts.
The woman had a hard time separating herself from the flowers, but when she knew that an artist would be able to use them, it made the whole process easier.She brought her bridal bouquet in and asked if we wanted that as well.
The woman Kerstin talks about is Lena Wickberg and when she heard Open Art was collecting flowers, she decided to donate her own collection. Lena started collecting flowers when she and her husband moved in together in the late 1980s. On top of a blue cabinet she put flowers from birthday parties, some of which she had grown in the garden of her country house, and gifts. When they moved to a new apartment, the cabinet and the flowers came along with them and slowly, but surely, the collection grew.

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They are getting more and more fragile and of course drier by the day, but they are amazingly beautiful, especially the roses, says Lena.
In September, it will be two years since her husband passed away and Lena started thinking about what she would do with the apartment, and with the flowers when she heard about OpenArt needing flowers.
The flowers have such a sentimental value to me that it felt great to be able to give them to the art instead of throwing them in the bin, Lena says. There's hardly anything left of my bridal bouquet from my first marriage; it's mostly just wires and a few roses and corn flowers- they get very fragile when you dry them- so I am very excited to see what the artist can do with them.
Lena, who paints with watercolors herself, believes the connection to art through the donations is very important to the people of Orebro. Art should be close to people who otherwise might not get the chance, can actually meet the art. Lena says that she is very inspired by the fantastic ideas the artists have and that they inspire people to be creative and even a little crazy..."
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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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The Making of "The Tree and Me"

4/24/2015

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In the hurly burly of everyday city life I often long for that experience of connection, of deep stillness, that comes when one is in natural surroundings.

When in nature I am particularly fascinated with old trees. I often stop walking and look at them for ages. I have sketchbooks upon sketchbooks filled with sketches and writings about trees. The act of focused observation brings about a deepened awareness of nature and of the moment in time.

My imagination is tickled by the fact that old trees have been around for generations before I was born-they have eavesdropped on the secrets, heartaches and fears of those who came before and they will probably be standing tall when my own life and all its components so precious to me today are over. There is something oddly centering in this reflection.

Nature and its processes are unresting and also unhurried. The more I focus on this vein of thinking the more I am aware of a depth in the processes of the universe that makes our petty everyday concerns seem like surface ripples.

Some of this idea of the ephemerality of our walking the earth is expressed in these studio experiments. Made out of newspaper and grass these empty footprints mark absence, loss and fragility of existence.

Newspaper with all of its stories is the very essence of worldliness. It also epitomizes the ephemeral as its value is over as soon as it has been read. In this work I have dissolved newspaper into organic materials-grass, henna, vegetable wastes, coffee, to contemplate upon the fleeting nature of worldly concerns in the face of the more pervasive nature of universal forces.

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The processes of preparing the materials by boiling with chemicals draws upon  traditional techniques for paper making from vegetable material
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The very act of building up the work one layer at a time, waiting for it to dry before the next layer could be applied began to mimic the processes of the natural world. The structure took months to complete.
The smaller sculptural forms scattered at the base are each the negative form within my own fist reflecting upon the futility of trying to grasp things which would inevitably slip through ones fingers. To see these more clearly as well as to see the finished work click here: The Tree and Me 

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The Material of Time: Debut Solo Show

3/16/2015

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This series of paintings and sculptural works are inspired by natural surfaces built up over time. The surfaces of nature reflect the phenomenon that bring about their creation- weather, geography, geology and the inherent intelligence of each cell within the biological forms of trees, lichens, moss and fungus. These surfaces record the passage of time occurring continuously, steadily over decades oblivious to the many ups and downs of human fortune. They are a reminder that everything is always in a state of flux yet despite the seeming disorder and chaos there is an underlying order.

I was honored that Kumari Nahappan, an artist I have admired for long, agreed to curate this show.
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The Making of "Dead Plants Don't Grow"

1/14/2015

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Why Dead Plants?


This work was done during a November 2014 artist residency at BigCI (otherwise known as Bilpin International Ground for Creative Initiatives). BigCI is located at the edge of the Wollemi National Park (part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area in Australia). I was told that this part of the world has the largest variety of flora in the world after the Amazon Basin. I would walk for hours in the “bush” (Australian for forest) soaking in the natural beauty of the area, often stopping to sit on a rock to sketch or write something in my sketchbook. On one of these walks, some dead plants wedged between tall grass and shrubs caught my eye. They just lay there almost invisible amongst the amazing vegetation that grew all around them. Fascinated by their fragile unique beauty I took them back to the studio and started studying them through drawing.

After that day, every time I was outdoors I started noticing more and more of the dead plants. Their woody rhythmic shapes, the forms of their leaves, pods and branches all fascinated me. The very fact that I often trod on them as I navigated my way through the bush brought home the humility and fate of these amazing creations of nature.
 
Every walk ended with me bringing more of these plants back to the studio. I laid them out before me on the floor and the tables and suspended them in the air. I wanted to see them in their uniqueness –freeing the forms from the clutter of an abundant forest. 

Cycles of Life

Working in this way I pondered the ultimate destiny of my dead plants- to be absorbed back into the earth from which they had grown. Yet in their ceasing to exist they would provide nourishment to the next generation of forest undergrowth and even the tall trees of the bush. 

The nature of life is cyclical whether it is plants or humans. I thought of the floral veils that are used to decorate a bridal home in India. The fragrance and colour of the flowers are intrinsic to the bridal festivities. Yet on the day after the wedding when the bride leaves her parent’s home and goes to her husband’s house these flowers are already wilting. As the floral veil is taken down to be thrown away there is a melancholy associated with the act of saying adieu to a daughter or sister. But even in the midst of this sorrow one looks forward to happier events around the corner as she embarks upon a new life. Influenced by memories of floral veils, the work took on the form of a veil. 

The Urban Veil

One of the dictionary definitions of a veil is “something that conceals, separates or screens”. A city dweller often views the natural world on a handphone, a computer or the television. Even when we get closer there is often a camera lens or a car window that separates us from nature. All these “screens” conceal from us our connection to the natural world. How often are we able to enter into natural surroundings and know ourselves again as a part of it?
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To view the finished work click here
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Excess of Interiority in Contemporary Urban Life

1/3/2015

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PictureWalter De Maria, The New York Earth Room, 1977. Long-term installation at 141 Wooster Street, New York City. Photo: John Cliett. Copyright Dia Art Foundation
City life today is lived largely indoors with a lot of involvement in "non-physical worlds". By non-physical worlds I mean the worlds we enter when watching television, working on the computer, browsing the internet or talking on the phone. Rebecca Solnit calls this an “excess of interiority”. By this she means that  we are losing contact with the physical world outside of the worlds created by the gadgets in our homes and offices. This loss of contact in turn results in an obliteration of  our relation to our material origins and even to our own bodies.  We no longer experience our own body as a natural system integrated with other natural systems. For example, our morning coffee is consumed without a thought to the myriad natural processes that go into the making of each cup (where the bean was grown, the weather, the soil, where the milk, sugar, water comes from, and so forth). Our inability to see our life in connection to these processes makes the cup of coffee a potent representation of how nature is absent from our awareness.

Experiencing substance as a way of connecting with natural origins

Some artists, instead of using scenes as reminders of nature, use substance as the bearer of meaning. Celebrating the physicality of substance unravels alienation from the natural world.

One of my favourite examples is Walter de Maria’s Earth Room (1977, earth, Dia Art Foundation, New York). It is made up of 250 cubic yards of earth (197 cubic meters)
3,600 square feet of floor space (335 square meters)
22 inch depth of material (56 centimeters)
Total weight of sculpture: 280,000 lbs. (127,300 kilos)

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The New York Earth Room has been on long-term view to the public since 1980. This work was commissioned and is maintained by Dia Art Foundation. It is a reminder that earth is the substance that has been hidden by urbanization and washed away by modern sanitation.

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The Earth Room at the Dia Foundation Offices, New York- Interior View
For many city dwellers ideas about nature come from video footage in blockbuster movies and calendar photographs. They imagine a place that is pristine and virgin, something that will be defiled if it comes in contact with human presence. Venturing out of urban sites, some may experience disappointment that the countryside is not always the picture perfect idyll they have been led to expect.

The Earth Room, made up of a huge quantity of mud, requires constant tending and replacement to keep it moist yet not growing fungus, etc. Its power lies in the tension between the repulsion we feel for dirt and the pedestal we put art on. At a deeper level earth bears connotations of fertility and decay- aspects of life and death that technological advancement can influence only to a limited extent. It reminds us that our bodies will return to the earth when we die- to the very dirt that we shun during our lifetime. Works such as these remind us that nature is not just a pretty picture to be looked at. It is also more than a life support system. It is that from which our very existence springs and into which it will be absorbed.
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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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