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Sheela Gowda, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, review: Confidence is shown in the artist’s simple story telling

Sheela Gowda's new work at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham
Sheela Gowda's new work at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham

I travel to Birmingham on one of the hottest days of the year to see the work of Sheela Gowda. I confess to being a long term follower of Gowda. Of all the installations at Tate Modern, Gowda's Behold 2009, containing 4,000 metres or four kilometers of rope made of human hair, 20 car bumpers is one of the most memorable installations currently on show. To make the length of rope necessitated 1,000 seamless knots which the artist herself made. Gowda had said in an earlier interview, “Handling a material makes me understand its limitations and its potential … I therefore do not outsource the physical aspect of art-making. Behold recently acquired for the Tate collection was shown initially in the Venice Biennale. The mixture of hair and found objects - the steel car bumpers carefully hung horizontally wound together with the ropes of hair allowed to loop and spill onto the floor. The talismanic quality of the hair, given initially as an offering to assure the driver’s safe passage, here subjugated by the ever present modernity of a burgeoning economy. There is a strong linearity contrasting with the looping forms sculpture that recalls “drawing in space".

Gowda, who was born in 1957, trained to be a painter in her native India before being awarded a scholarship to study in London at the Royal College of Art. Her tutor painter Peter de Francia “liked India”, she says and she was excited as previously she had never thought she would get to travel to Europe. She studied first in London and then went to Paris where she studied for three months and met her now husband Christoph Storz a Swiss conceptual artist. Storz introduced her to European Conceptual language amongst others the work of Joseph Beuys. At the time Storz was considering making a work encasing the iconic Swiss novel Heidi in cow dung. Gowda started thinking about cow dung the material in a different way as a political and also gender based work- something she explored in various works on returning to India where Storz joined her.

Returning to India she continued to use the methodology of De Francia of always challenging herself. His words “always be inventive” and his warnings “don’t be too subtle” still implicit to her thinking. While her works also reflect her painters training with line/shape/colour, where line is the main form something that continues to be the back-bone of her work. Her installations are often thought out with sketches in her omni-present sketchbooks.

Gowda's 'Behold 2009' made of human hair and car bumpers at Tate Modern (© Sheela Gowda)
Gowda's 'Behold 2009' made of human hair and car bumpers at Tate Modern (© Sheela Gowda)

Gowda largely gave up painting when she returned to India in the 1990s. Replacing the paintings with found images, like the large room sized photograph in Ikon to replace the figurative paintings she had made but one feels that paintings pull is never far away- although perhaps not necessarily the figurative works she had done before. In her large new and as yet untitled installation at the Ikon she has been using found objects. Metal drums, a material that Gowda has used before, are flattened, segmented and circles are pressed out before being hand beaten into “bandlis,” the bowls in which materials, sand, concrete and slurry are carried to construction sites. It is a recycled material and the history of its usage is clearly present. On the wall whole flattened sheets, some complete some with circles missing other sheets manipulated and twisted to form towers of piercing line. On the floor a variety of bandlis each different from its neighbour. Confidence is shown in the artist’s simple story telling. The viewer is compelled to see the beauty and strength in these materials that would be ordinarily overlooked.

Installation view of Gowda's work at Ikon Gallery
Installation view of Gowda's work at Ikon Gallery

In a second also un-named work are coated rebars, rods and support poles that Gowda has found, cleaned and collected. It was hard physical work this work and yet here it looks effortless redolent of poetry and political in the best sense of the word. It is not trivialising human labour but drawing our attention to the beauty in ordinary craft. This is an artist that finds a material and then does what needs doing to work with it. Quoting from an earlier interview with her husband and a curator she said” I do not begin a work without an idea, an intuition, often inspired by my encounter with a material or an image. But this is deliberately placed at the teetering edge. It evolves and changes, sometimes quite drastically. It is a process where I stand my ground but let the material challenge me”.

It may often mean hard work for Gowda but she does not shy away from it. She has given Birmingham and Ikon a very special present of a wonderful thought provoking summer exhibition and if it is beautiful and also refers to the architecture of the building and could be called site specific, a term that Gowda herself heartily dislikes, it is none the worse for it.