My primary passions are Art, Philosophy and seeing India and Indians succeed globally. My first foray into a not for profit was with Advaita Academy (2010) and the second was Creative India Foundation(2011) . The first was to promote Indian spirituality and the second was to promote Indian Art globally. Both these foundations are now merged into INDICA.
Within Art, I am more particularly passionate about Sculptures/ Conceptual Art/ Environmental Art/ Public Art. Having travelled to several sculpture parks around the world, it has been my dream to set up India’s first Sculpture Park.Apart from the sculpture park in India, I also wanted that all sculpture parks around the world should have the works featured by Indian artists. I was also imagining reaching out to NRIs around the world and obtaining sponsorship from the local communities such that the traffic round-about in all major cities have a sculptural installation by an Indian artist.
Through Creative India, I had the opportunity to support several Indian artists exhibit their works abroad or expand their craft through overseas residencies programs. Diana Campbell, Art Curator spearheaded this work.
One such artist we had the privilege of promoting was Hemali Bhuta. She did her residency program at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) ( https://ysp.org.uk ) that was supported by Creative India. Spread over 500 acres YSP is the “Bahubali’ of sculpture parks. The work that Hemali produced as a result of her residency is now installed here.
Having to spend 21 days outside of India in order to get back to Singapore, I chose UK as a destination as I could visit various sculpture parks. In the last ten days I travelled around and saw 7 of them. Today was the 8th one and it was YSP.
Perhaps some day I will write a more detailed essay about my experience at this park, but I just wanted to share with you Hemali’s extraordinary work and my own feeling of seeing it for the first time after it was installed here 9 years ago.
Sculptural Art conveys through the heaviest of materials the subtlest of thoughts and emotions. In this case, Hemali used bronze to convey her art. She made bronze roots that are embedded in the ground in a wooded area and somebody walking by will not be able to distinguish the bronze roots from the real ones. The description given in on of the photos below will give you an understanding about how she conceived this work.
Apart from the extraordinary beauty of the art work itself, the sheer satisfaction of seeing the results of one’s support made me write this post. I experienced immense joy and pride in playing a part in the only Indian work featured in one of the best sculptural parks in the world. Her work is featured along side the best contemporary sculptors of our times. A big thank you to Diana for making this happen.
Our contemporary artists have some extraordinary talent. Sadly we have not done enough to encourage them to go global. Here too China as over taken us. Chinese artists receive 100 X support and patronage. We too must do more. We need more artists who are rooted in our civilisation to show case our culture globally. Renaissance is not only about preserving our heritage but advancement of various artistic disciplines. This is where contemporary artists have an immense role to play. There is much to be done, but I am confident we will soon be recognised as a global art destination. That is our destiny.
Sometime back I created ‘Rooted & Free’ as a tagline for IGENPLUS. Today seeing the Roots installation by Hemali, I experienced a sense of unbridled Freedom and confidence about the potential for our country to be a global soft power.
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