Love[f]Art #15 | Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran

Hosted by Amanda Love, the LoveArt podcast brings listeners into direct conversation with contemporary artists, extending the work of the independent art advisory, LoveArt, based in Sydney, New York and Athens.

The series draws from Love[f]Art, LoveArt’s ongoing program of intimate, in-conversation recordings with artists, originally conceived in 2020. Filmed in the most unlikely of settings—the guest powder room at the Love residence—the project strips things back to a one-to-one exchange, focusing on ideas, process and the conditions that shape contemporary practice.

This episode features Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, a Sri Lankan-born Sydney based artist. Nithiyendran explores global histories and figurative languages, particularly in relation to idolatry, monumentality, gender, race, and religiosity. The installation discussed in this episode includes a series of three large, hand-built ceramic wall masks and a series of miniature bronze faces mounted to the walls. Masks have been recurring motifs within my practice. I’m interested in their layered, multi-regional histories as well as their abilities to function as mechanisms of power, concealment, and polymorphism—in ritual, performance, or protest.

Recorded in March 2025, at the time of the work’s installation, the conversation offers a direct insight into the thinking behind the piece, and the broader concerns that underpin her practice.

Nithiyendran is represented by Sullivan+Strumpf.

Additional information, including the video version of this podcast, is available here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, and welcome to the 15th iteration of Love Art's nano project, Love for Art, where, in response to the increasing scale and complexity of contemporary institutions, we continue our exploration of the small, the intimate, and the one-to-one encounter. Here, on Gadigal Land, we transform our nano guest bathroom into a board and belize for contemporary practice, showcasing the strength of current artistic expression through inventive, site-specific installations, which are, by necessity, innovative and ingenious. I'm Amanda Love, and it's my great pleasure to introduce our latest installation by Ramesh Mario Nithyendron. A Sydney-based artist of Sri Lankan Tamil heritage, Ramesh's practice spans sculpture, installation, and figuration, intersecting with the politics of idolatry, representation, and materiality. He's renowned for his dynamic and highly expressive ceramic works, but operates equally comfortably across multiple mediums, including bronze, neon, and concrete, bringing an irreverent energy to historical and spiritual references. A bundle of creative energy, Ramesh also lectures at the University of New South Wales School of Art and Design. Was a finalist in the Suleiman and the Archboard Prize in 2019. He won the Melbourne Art Foundation Young Artists Award in 2018 and received the New South Wales Visual Arts Fellowship in 2014. You can find his extended biography on our website, or if you want a deeper dive, check out Ramesh, the genre-defying sculptures of contemporary artist Ramesh Mario Nithyendron, published in 2022. So, welcome Ramesh. Where are you joining us from? Your Pleasure Palace studio in Sydney?

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Always. My favorite place ever. How's the sound? You can hear me all good?

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Yes, I think that's fine.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Great, perfect.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Now, you probably don't know this, Ramesh, but I actually saw your undergraduate show in 2011. Yeah. And I have to say, of course, the work. But what specifically impressed me, and my takeaway, if you like, was more your distinct and definite point of view, which of course uh is what one's looking for in a graduate show, but often very hard to find. And since then, your there I say your stellar trajectory has been outwardly very mobile, yet internally also very consistent. Something I I'd like really like to tease out over the next 40 minutes. So I thought we'd jump straight in with your 2016 exhibition, Mad Men, at the National Gallery of Australia, of which we have a short clip, and which I understand is a special commission and at the time your most ambitious work.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

I guess the cultural and social and political context of what the National Gallery of Australia is, what it means in the context of creating our national identity and our cultural landscape. And what I find in many, say, large-scale state institutions and I guess um national institutions, particularly in the West, is that um there seems to be a slightly dated approach in the way that art from other regions are framed, and they're often racialized or positioned in the context of specific regions. Um, and with this, there's often this faith-based um positioning of art, especially from Asia. My parents migrated here from Sri Lanka when in 1989 and I was one, and um their marriage meant that you know, my mum was Catholic and my dad was Hindu, so and diasporic, you know, with a diasporic family and community, you'd often go to multiple faith-based institutions, which like Temp the Temple and the Church, um, in more specific terms. And I guess um from a very young age, it was this I had this like fear of going to the church, which is just on a not even from a philosophical level, I found it really scary because it smelled a bit funny, and there were all this like pain and violence and gore, like framed all over the architecture and the the pictures and the imagery, and it was all about guilt and routine and sitting and standing and being nicely dressed, but then we'd go to the temple in Westmid and we'd take our shoes off, and there'd be chickens and peacocks and colourful and flowers and food. And I was always like really jealous that I'd have to go to like scripture classes, and my cousins were like having a great time like at the temple. Um, so I think it's although I'm an atheist and like quite confident in that position, um, exploring these religions from a cultural perspective. Um, so there's no uh, I guess, religious worship thing going on, it's all secular.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

How do you how do you feel um seeing you a younger self?

SPEAKER_00 5:10

You know, I have to say, Amanda, it's quite confronting um seeing clips of you from 10 years ago. And also, but you know what? What the what the most amazing thing I find is that I can actually really see how our industry and ideas and culture has developed since those times. You know, and it's kind of amazing. I think that's part of growing older and maturing. You actually have the benefit of being able to process something as a young adult and then as a later adult. And what I really loved about watching that clip was that some of those things that I was referring to, I think, at least in Australia, have been ironed out really successfully. You know, especially when we're thinking about how we place and display objects from other regions, I think there's a lot of critical discourse happening, which is really kind of interrogating the power embedded in those display dynamics.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

So I think that's internationally as well, Ramesh. I mean, I think that that whole politics, I'd I'd say you could frame even in the politics of decolonization. Do you you is that what you're talking about as well?

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Yeah, yeah, totally. And it's quite funny when I think when I was a university, uh like that clip, I was just fresh out of university. I'd finished my MFA in 2014. And I think when I was going through university, a lot of that uh discourse or that ideology was looking at this idea of presenting counter-narratives to dominant Western archetypes. And as I've become a little bit older, I'm kind of less interested in presenting those counter-narratives, and I'm more interested in this idea of parallel narratives. You know, what does it mean to reimagine centers and place centers in different kinds of ways? And rather than framing things in opposition, framing things in parallel in terms of lineages, in tandem.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Well, I think it's interesting because a lot of in that 10 years, well, yeah, in those ten years, it's quite interesting. We won't get into this because it's a political conversation, but a lot of what were the counter-narratives and the right to have counter-narratives that needed to be positioned at the time have now been co-opted by other forces and turned into blunt instruments, um, which are doing the opposite of what they were meant to do. So I think your idea of parallelity and um contemporaneity is a good one. I I have to say, Ramesh so there does get a time when you look at clips of yourself ten years ago and find them much less confronting than clips of yourself right now. Sorry, hold that thought. So if we look at so that was a very ambitious, so just out of um just out of um art school or just in the middle of your your your tuition, if you're but you because you're between degrees at the time. You just got your MFA, I think.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

Yeah, yeah, in 2013.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

A major solo exhibition at Australia's premier um art gallery institution. Uh was a pretty big um, it must have been very exciting, confronting, terrifying. How how was that for you?

SPEAKER_00 8:22

You know, um something that has come across in a lot of my work currently is mortality and affinity. And it was very different back then. Uh I really felt unstoppable. Like I could make infinite artworks. You know, I had this view that every single idea I had in my mind, I could make them in my lifetime. And I think that was the privilege of being a youth of, you know, health and vitality and also slight naivety. And but at the same time, you know, uh, it was this this show also happened at a time where ceramics in the context of contemporary art was having a certain global transitory moment. So this show also, when we talk about terrifying, you know, I could speak about terrifying personally, identity-wise, um, career-wise, but the most terrifying thing, if I could be completely frank with you, was making large-scale figurative ceramics. And these are all life-size works. And I hadn't really seen a precedent of, you know, apart from kind of large-scale historical ceramics, you know, terracotta warriors, you know, large, you know, horses that were fired in sheds in India. I wasn't sure how the technology was going to last.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

And I was gonna say, so structurally, I mean, they're very complex to make those that scale stand up literally.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Well, I always say um that my aesthetic preference or my register gives me a lot of flexibility within my sculptural practice. You know, if bits pull apart or if I need something light as a large part, you know, I'm not bound to using a specific material or a specific technology. And a lot, that large head in the middle, you know, all of those arms that are outstretched and, you know, reaching to the sky, they're all coated polystyrene. So they're really light things. So I was trying to actually really think about this narrative of materiality, but I wasn't so interested in this framework of high and low. You know, I thought that was a bit old and daggy. I was more interested in asking myself the question at the time, which was what is the materiality of contemporary societies? You know, what does what is it what does it mean to move through the world world in a material setting? And in this installation, there's ceramics, there's polystyrene, there's human hair, there's beads from you know AliExpress, there's cardboard, there's spray paint.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

Rubber snakes, polystrame.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Rubber snakes, tennis.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

I mean, would you say materially, would you say materially, Ramesh, that you're a DEI person?

SPEAKER_00 11:07

You know what? Um interestingly, I think at the at the earlier stage of my career, I was a little bit more um rogue with materials. I was so I was so happy just to use anything. And I think what happened to me a little bit, which I'm trying to kind of get back from it from it as well, is you start to develop more experience in institutions and showing work and selling work, and this idea of archivalness comes into your mind. And you said it's so suggestive, but at the same time, I think when I make works now that have that kind of stability and permanence, what comforts me is the fact that ceramics, fired ceramics, have been around since the beginning of time, and there's this kind of amazing connection to life, time, cultures, materials, immemorial through that. And that that I find creatively quite enriching.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Um at the time, because in the video you you do discuss to what we were alluding to, how Western museums often categorize Asian art as primarily faith-based. Um, and so with this with the sheer scale and the complexity, the compositional complexity of mud men, were you at the time deliberately challenging or satisfatizing common institutional narratives around Asian art? Or was that a function that that did did that arise or that interpretation become possible out of just what you did materially and and as part of the work?

SPEAKER_00 12:45

It's an interesting question or provocation because it really draws on these narratives of institutional critique around, you know, uh addressing what it means to show within a collecting institution versus a festival or a non-for-profit. Like and at the time, I remember going through the museum uh as part of the site visit, and the area that I just loved the most was the Asian collection. It was this kind of dark grotto-like space. There were these kind of concrete veneers, a lot of the um highly ornate architraves, you know, from Indonesia that were in their collection were on display. And I found just on a basic level, I was most attracted to that area. And I remember asking myself, just as a kind of conceptual provocation, what would it mean to move this uh collection display outside of this grotto-like space where you enter this threshold into this otherworldly sentiment and bring it into this open, airy, brutalist, high-ceiling um modality? And that's that's what kind of prompted me to think through.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

Do that. And we'll come on to that, where you really push that thought a lot further in a minute. But um let's move on to Create a 19, which was at Kazula Powerhouse, and it was your first solo exhibition in in Western Sydney where you grew up. And I wondered how how how did this context shape that work?

SPEAKER_00 14:26

Man, it's growing up in Western Sydney, I feel like so many amazing Australian artists have come out of Western Sydney, and we're really seeing those artists develop, and now there's all this kind of cultural and uh infrastructure, you know, that's kind of working to build that context. But when I was, you know, going through art school and I was a young art young artist, um it wasn't cool or anything to be from Western Sydney. You know, I went to high school at Sydney Boys High and I was traveling from Auburn to Surrey Hills for you know seven years of my life. And I remember I feared or pain.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

I grew up in Wollongong.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

Ah, like I just remember feeling distinctly embarrassed about where I was from.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Oh, I always used to say, I I didn't know there was anything wrong with Wollongong until I came to Sydney, but then I learned to refer it to it as the South Coast.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Yep, yes, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Um, you know, there's something I think innately, I think Costula Powerhouse is amazing. I think it it it's one of those institutions that gives artists opportunities to experiment and develop at really early stages of their career. And within this, whenever I kind of approach a, I guess, inverted commas institutional show, I always ask myself, you know, what is possible with that institution in that space? And what I really loved about that gallery was it had no windows. So it was comp you could completely change the lighting conditions. And because Casula had a very specific dealing with performance, there were lots of technicians who were really skilled in lighting. So we kind of created this almost, for lack of a better context, like some kind of club, sex dungeon, otherworldly urban grotto. And we used these um vitrines that were actually borrowed from a retail supplier. So these are the kinds of things you would see mannequins, handbags, you know, presented in in thoroughfare, in shopping malls. And I was quite interested in that language of display, like how can we actually create reverence or even some kind of, you know, with these objects. And I like that kind of sci-fi dimension meets the museum dimension. But in terms of what it means meant to have an exhibition in Western Sydney, it's it's always quite grounding because what I find is that the way I've always tried to present art is without obfuscation. So I don't want to talk crap around what I'm making. I I always want the object to have some authority in being able to speak for itself. Primacy, it's about the object, and I I feel like the art object should be special. And I think when you're presenting work in a context where you have really diverse backgrounds of people engaging, I think it's quite that's I think it's quite democratic to approach art in that way.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

Um, I agree, and I I agree about Kazula Powerhouse too, they had a whole exhibition of our collection once in about 2010. It was an amaz it's an amazing institution. Um and with amazing engagement. I I wanted to, I was going to mention before when we were talking about the previous exhibition, but we can talk about it here as well because all the way through your practice, and I suppose it gets back to your idea of the primacy of the object, there is the notion of plinth. The plinth is are the plinths are part often part of the work. They're very specific. Um, do you do you always think of the works on in that that context? Yeah, you always have plenty. Do you always make your own plinths?

SPEAKER_00 18:30

I've always I I think this is also a response to this, I guess the style of university education that I was trained within. And I I don't believe any kind of object is culturally or socially mute. You know, this idea that a white plinth is invisible, uh, you know, that's a that's a a provocation, you know, that we could consider, but they actually aren't. And I was all I was I'm always really interested in a the sculptural possibilities of creating and developing plinth language styles, but also the value possibilities. You know, how can we actually think through this idea of elevation or de-elevation or um accessibility or you know, the ways in which uh sculptures, especially figurative sculptures, can reflect and engage with their audiences through the language of plints. But I also love fashion and shopping. And something I noticed very early on was that a lot of the time the language of museum display and the language of retail display were often quite similar, you know. Um there'd be there'd be plints, there'd be vitrines, there'd be glass cases. And then now, at this time, now we even have kind of installation environments that are activating these goods. And I was also kind of interested in that approach, you know, like how are we presenting objects of reverence and not just religious reverence, but watches, jewelry, rings, like how what is the culture of presentation? And these were some of the considerations I was thinking about.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

Well, we'll move on to 2021, uh, where you installed avatar towers in the art gallery of New South Wales. And this comes in, I think, to your bringing when we were talking about visiting Hindu temples and that kind of display. But this was a mammoth exhibition comprising 77 sculptures inspired by Hindu temple interiors and the art gallery's own collection of South Asian historical sculptures. And I just have to ask, looking at these works, um, especially the ones in in the in the niches, do I detect subtle self-portraits in some of these D's a kind of Hitchcock and cameo, perhaps?

SPEAKER_00 20:47

Yeah, or perhaps um it's I have a very dry response to this sometimes, which is there's often an ethical dimension to the representation of imagery, and that's just part of living in a complex, you know, global setting. And I'm never I never actually represent other living people because I find myself accountable to them in that context of representation. So I've always found working in an expressive register, you know, or an imaginative register, using elements of my own person makes me feel the most creative because in some idealistic, perhaps idealistic setting, I can, you know, make my nose a certain shape. I can you know hyperbolize certain features, I can work in a way where I'm not hyper attached to how the subject might respond to my to the work. And that's been that's why a lot of the time, sometimes you know, a lot of the a lot of my time in the studio. Is about experimenting with form. It's looking at color. It's trying to develop glazers, paint, textures that are new or comparable to my skin or comparable to types of hair. And I often find sometimes when I'm really trying to understand and develop certain formal languages, working in a self-portrait context really allows myself to be creative within and amongst that. But I also think a lot of those symbols that I use to gesture to self-portraiture, certain hairstyles, you know, top knots, certain types of jewelry, they're also historically coded and have these kinds of um I guess semiotic or symbolic links to, you know, Buddhist sculpture, for example, or Hindu sculpture. And then I suddenly find that there are types of, you know, Buddhist sculpture that were very specifically related to Hindu sculpture. So I think it's all about this idea of creating a continuum and providing a type of language within a really interesting lineage.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

And um and would you would you extend that sort of that in incarnation of yourself? Would you ascend that to you to your spirit or energy as well as form in addition to your form? Is that fair question?

SPEAKER_00 23:22

No, no, no, I get it. Um I think I think the interesting thing is there's also a I was also interested, especially when I was studying, and I think when we started back quite a while, I'm having all these memories to being at university and reading and understanding, and I was really interested in a lot of uh queer theory and theories around performance and performativity. And you know, I I don't do live art or anything like that, um, but I've always been interested in this idea of how do you embed a sense of performativity or artifice, artifice um to the material itself. And I always thought about this material process of exaggeration and hyperbole. How can you make glaze perform glaze? How can you make clay perform clay? Um, and sometimes I wonder if that's quite a nihilistic approach, but I'm really interested in in what materials can do that other materials can't. Like I'm not interested in making paint look like a photograph. I'm interested in, say, paint looking how can paint look the most like paint? How can clay look the most like clay? Um and that really inspires me in the studio, and there's something really um, I guess, something beyond reason that happens there, you know, when your hand touches a wet piece of clay and then it changes, and then you know, there are these really complex, non-linear, hard to describe things that happen with how you form these objects. Now I'm sounding a bit woo-woo.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

This is uh it's it's all part of this what we were talking about. I suppose. Um well I suppose then given that we're well, it's really it's a complex, it's a complex interplay between artifice and non-artifist. You're sort sort of switching it. You're you're making art you're making artificial objects or you're creating artifice without trying to make the materials which you're using them seem artificial. You're making you're you're trying to remain true to materiality. But I just while we're talking about personal features, uh, we have to mention, I feel here, manic smiles.

SPEAKER_02 25:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:40

Um, you know, I've always thought about this um when we thought talk about art of smile. I think expressions are really significant uh to the work. And I always try and think about an expression that, despite their heightened appearance, has a sense of ambiguity. You know, this kind of manic smile, these large ear-to-ear grins, can also be quite, you know, gesturing to some kind of pathos or pain or torment. And I I think that's that's quite interesting to me as well. But the other kinds of function of, you know, vernacular South Asian sculpture that I was always responding to was uh sculpture that existed in contexts around guardianship. You know, what does it mean to look over, to protect, to scare things away, you know, to invite the good things in? And often it was these kinds of bulging eyes that, you know, in these Neo-Guardian figures or Dvarapala figures where the veins of the eyes started to pop because they couldn't even close them, you know, because they had to keep guard of these places. And that heightened sense or that performative sense, I think I was really drawn to. But it also is something that quite comes naturally to me when I think about how I present and create and describe figures. But last year I've been really interested in this idea of inward from last year, inward looking, and lots of figures now have their eyes closed. I'm trying to be there are lots of seated figures now kind of coming into um play. So I think I'm probably just at a slightly different stage of my life now.

SPEAKER_01 27:23

Well, this was I mean, this was 2020, or this was eons ago in in in part time. But um, and you you do love a tower remesh.

SPEAKER_00 27:33

Yeah, yeah. I'm uh I love um this I think scale is something I also I also consider as something almost comparable to a medium. Like I'm always think about how how can we use, conceive, consider scale as something to communicate something. And what with this specific installation, that vestibule at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is like it's actually it's really stunning. You know, it's got gorgeous marble, it's got these amazing tiles, it's got these beautiful sandstone, these vitrines. And I wanted to present something that almost felt formally appropriate, you know. I didn't want to I wanted to kind of highlight the architecture while contrasting it at the same time. So it's not trying to kind of battle in it, in my mind at least. It was trying to complement and feel like it could in some capacity be part of the space. But the language that I brought into this installation or that actual specific tower was the language of makeshift scaffolding, which was something that I'd often see in parts of Asia. You know, sometimes it wasn't these metal, you know, nice metal bits. It was there was this kind of DIY ingenuity where it was bamboo and then bits of wood and then a bit of board, and then you would just climb up. And but at the top of that tower is actually a raw clay mound, so an unfired clay sculpture. And I thought it was kind of interesting to bring something that all the sculptures were essentially made from or had in their process. There are some bronze figures in that installation as the top. You know, what does it mean to bring something from the ground and elevate it to give it that kind of transcendental transcendental quality? Transcendentality.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

It was an amazing, um, it was an amazing exhibition. Now, your international solo debut was idols of just talking using unfired clay as a segue here, Idols of Mud and Water, which was in 2023, which transformed Glasgow's tramway gallery into what you described at the time as a buzzing mythological playground. And central to that installation was a giant garden made from cob, mud, and straw. And I wonder what drew you to these extra traditional materials and and how did they shape that exhibition's broader narrative?

SPEAKER_00 30:14

The at that time I was really thinking about the elements, the three elements in particularly. So earth, fire, and water, and then I kind of imagined that electricity was another element. So I was looking at these points in time and thinking about moments in which earth, water, earth, water, fire collided, and flooding was something that came into my mind. And you see the language of um there's sandbags. So this is actually the kind of big sculpture existed as a fountain, and there were these um some dribbles, and you know, the water kind of pumped up and through. And I was interested in presenting this narrative that this figure could either be, you know, have caused has caused some kind of flood or is protecting, you know, against some kind of flood. And the big house that I made is basically where all the precious sculptures have been preserved, you know. So I was really looking at makeshift architecture that was flood responsive, but at the same time thinking about this kind of um uh DIY temple where all of these small, intricate, detailed terracotta sculptures that were gilded could live. And I was interested in Cobb because it was a very specific rather than being a is Cobb. What I feel is COM. It's a combination, it's it's an earth-building technique. So it's a combination of clay deposits in the ground, earth, straw, a bit of lime. So it has a very specific history in parts of Europe in terms of building houses. And it's often used to render the outside of houses, but sometimes houses, tiles are actually built out of this material. So it's quite a sustainable material in some capacity. But when I was thinking about building from the earth as a narrative structure, you know, clay is from the ground, but building that sculpture in a way was quite literally built from the ground. And I found that to be quite an interesting um conceptual proposition because it's a temporary it's a temporary sculpture. Um, and at the same time, it gave it this kind of immediate earthliness, like if you looked right up close to it, you could see the um you could see the bits of straw, you could see the bits of hay, you could see the bits of dirt um that went into the actual surface. Um, I also kind of like this narrative idea that you would have kind of imagined someone with massive hands coming down and forming this Unlike current president of the United States. Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of what um that's kind of what I was focusing on. But you know, as an artist, sometimes it's really hard to pinpoint exactly what were primary influences sometimes. Like other things I was thinking about were these filmic references of you know, these sci-fi um monstrous beings that kind of descend onto city landscapes and either cause havoc or change, you know. So that that also kind of came into my mind.

SPEAKER_01 33:33

Like King Kong or something.

SPEAKER_00 33:35

King Kong, Godzilla.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

Godzilla, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:38

So and then keep going. Oh no, I was just saying, and then around the um large sculpture around the house were these four kind of life-size ceramic figures, and they were a set they were modeled very loosely around um an archetype. So there was a big bronze work, which was the guardian. This that work was the fertility figure. Um, there was kind of like a male kind of regal figure, which was the one before with the reflection, and then there was a kind of troll-like guardian as well. Um, and this was the inside of the kind of temple, hut, shelter.

SPEAKER_01 34:15

Amazing exhibition. It traveled, didn't it?

SPEAKER_00 34:18

It traveled. So that iteration um went to another venue in regional UK. So that element of the installation did.

SPEAKER_01 34:26

And so moving on, um, given that you've been we've been looking at works that you've had in traditional Western institutions, how did it feel when you were included in Pop Sarvasia, which was actually was a year before at the Sharjah Art Foundation, uh, where your work was placed in dialogue with artists who used irony and humor to deal with issues from specifically from the perspective of the South Asian diaspora. Um, how did you how did you employ irony or satire andor satire in your contribution?

SPEAKER_00 34:59

I think the main what I find about exhibiting within this region, um, the region of South Asia or Asia even, is that the aesthetic and the palette becomes unremarkable. You know, audiences are see this kind of palette as a vernacular kind of palette. You know, you could look at Asari, you could look at how people might go to an event, and a lot of the qualities in my ceramics sculpture, you know, multiple colours, shiny, gold, elaboration, adorned, heightened display is just kind of a fact of life. Um, so in that respect, kind of exhibiting in these contexts means that what what the palette that I'm presenting doesn't become an address to austerity or anything like that. It's just it's just a fact. Um, you know, it is popular if we think about the context of the exhibition. Um and within this, within this kind of installation here, so again, I was thinking a little bit about this this kind of what is the popular language of South Asian sculpture, of South Asian vernacular, Indian Sri Lanka. And I understand I'm being using quite a blanket term for the region at that moment, but um it's just in a provocative sense. But for me, I think these works were really kind of bringing the palette, um, the vernacular colour scheme, the vernacular approach to kind of surface into sculptures. And I think they could handle a lot of colour, they could handle a lot of different colours. Um, you know, and there's also some irony in satire in that a lot of the um, some of the symbols are actually quite, they're very kind of culturally and historically loaded, you know, the tongues, the tongue out, you know, you see images of Kali like that, the third eye, you know, Shiva's kind of wisdom. You know, a lot of the time um gods and goddesses have these small companions that kind of come in and amongst them. And in this work here, there are also these decals printed on the ceramics, which are emojis, you know, things from pop, literally things from digital um culture.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

There's no ask you about that. I was gonna ask you about um, you know, the the the kind of clash between what could be seen as craft or folk in this exhibition, and then between what is actually pop culture and pop as we understand classic pop, if you can use that term.

SPEAKER_00 37:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:30

In art.

SPEAKER_00 37:31

I think I think I think it's a really I I think when we I think spoke quite early on about the NGA or just right in the beginning, we spoke about this idea of imagining different centers of culture and cultural production. And I think this show is quite interesting in that the kinds of hierarchies that might exist between folk art, contemporary art, design, you know, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, you know, places that I visited and have connections to, I'm ethnically uh Tamil. These kinds of like I also feel I feel like my visual literacy was was developed in a kind of cultural capacity. You know, like when you walk into um a Sri Lankan or Indian person's house in different parts, there are colourful sculptures, you know, there is heightened display, there are kind of domestic shrines a lot of the time. And for me, growing up, my my love of art, I say, was not from going to galleries or museums. My only encounter, my first encounters with galleries and museums was school excursions. You know, I was never actually taken to any of my own, you know, volition. It was actually going to festivals, people's houses, temples, churches, where I was able to kind of really immerse myself in the like in creative language.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

And yet I suppose in your first encounters with um those cultural languages were really as a tourist, weren't they, rather than as a cultural producer?

SPEAKER_00 39:01

See, that's I think that's that's a really interesting point that I've made because and where I think a lot of people, especially in the world and in global art discourse, are talking about, you know, diaspora, you know, what does it mean for different uh communities, ethnic communities, you know, to move to live in different areas and practice culture and create these new kinds of contexts and centers. And my a lot of my first encounters with objects that were traditionally, I guess, used, valued in ceremony, um, religion, sometimes even decoration, were as essentially a tourist, you know. So I was coming in um and having some connection, but not actually having experienced them, these objects, you know, sculptures, um, certain types of fabric weaved into their specific context. And I wouldn't romanticize it and say that I had a yearning or it was a, you know, there was a sense of loss. For me, it was more there was an intel I was kind of intellectually quite interested in that process. Even I remember as a teenager, I remember looking at these Sri Lankan Yakka masks as fridge magnets and like asking myself, what does it how what does it mean that I want to buy one of these fridge magnets? You know, and I thought that was interesting that I wasn't sure.

SPEAKER_01 40:33

Fascinating, actually. Um look, finally, before we discuss the current project we have here, let's come back to come back home to the Ballarat art gallery, where last year you exhibited seated figure self-portrait with interchangeable head, and which I actually believe I saw half-finished, no head at all, in your studio. And it was a new commission made in conversation with Buddha's Renunciation, which is a work by the English artist Nicholas Schabalier from 1884. We have a quick image of it and then we'll cut back to you talking about it. How did how did you approach making this work? I mean, did did Ballarat select select it in terms of wise, or did you select it? And if so, how and why did it resonate with you?

SPEAKER_00 41:20

So it came, the commission came about with um, so Adam Haddo, the architect, was the benefactor who supported the project. And this was really interesting. So it was an opportunity where the curator at the time, Julian McLaren, uh said, Let's commission something for the collection. What are you interested in at the moment? And I said, you know, I'm really interested in Buddhist tropes at the moment, because A, Sri Lanka is primarily a Buddhist um country currently, but also I was interested at the different kind of points of contact between Buddhist societies and the West, you know, if we're using that term now. And I was also making a lot of figures that were kind of in deep contemplation, you know, dreaming, meditating, sleeping, like all of those states. And Julie kind of alerted me to this very loved painting in the collection, which is actually it's a it's a painting that is of its time, if that makes sense. But there is a lot of um, there is potential to critique that painting in lots of ways. And the main kinds of from my research, the main kinds of critique of that original work was that it was quite a moralistic presentation of Buddha's renunciation. So when he was basically renouncing all of his material and possessions to the previous world, in most Eastern Asian depictions, it's an image of him with a machete cutting his long hair off as a symbol. But this image here is him leaving his wife and child.

SPEAKER_01 43:04

Now I can go back to the image.

SPEAKER_00 43:06

Prince Sadatha, you know, leaving his sleeping wife and child to pursue something that is considered that could be considered to be somewhat, you know, selfish. And, you know, and it is of it is of its time, you know, there's a specific exoticization to the image. You can see the tiger skins, you can see carved elephants, there's this kind of semi-nonspecific garb. Um, the woman is presented in quite an, I would argue, quite an eroticized um position. She's quite on display, you know, her chest is out. And I I wasn't really interested in coming in and presenting some kind of critique of this work. I uh like that for me is less interesting. I was more interested in thinking about how do you create now a work that could be used to discuss works like this. You know, what are the um if there was a Venn diagram of thematics, how could that be? Because I didn't, I guess I didn't want to make a work that is reliant on another collection work to have meaning or context. So what I was thinking about was I was was this so what you see here is this kind of seated figure. There's this kind of self-portraiture reference, and I brought back the kind of long um braid, uh the long ponytail that was in a lot of original depictions of Buddha's pronunciation. So I actually worked with my hairdresser um to create this long braid. Um and I was also interested in hair as this kind of way in which a lot of um people from the global south or different subcultures actually assert their identity. And I kind of brought this language of hair, I bought the lushness, I bought the kind of um to gesture to that original imagery of Buddha's renunciation. But then I also wanted to, those heads can actually be swapped. And there's also that, yeah, and there's also a um hair piece that we made that was more sculptural because in my mind, this was like the more um fantastical or mythical kind of um head that could exist on this um seated body. But the body is actually modeled in reference to a Gandharan Buddhist style of sculpture. So a style a style of Buddhist sculpture that emerged in Northwest Pakistan through context, contact with Alexander the Great. So you see these um images of you know Greco-Roman drapery um and a slight heightened sense of masculinity and muscularity within that those figures during that period. And I was quite interested in that moment of cross-cultural contact and thinking about that as a metaphor for what does it mean to, I guess, think about the sculptures I'm making not as a counter to tradition, but as a continuation of tradition.

SPEAKER_01 46:01

Right. Um so and then Shibaliya's painting is is highly polished and romanticized, as you were saying, a fantasy of Buddha's departure.

unknown 46:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:13

And in this exhibition, you've literally brought your studio, which which literally brings your practice, which foregrounds process and materiality, um, into the exhibition. Uh so are you is what you're saying is are you deliberately positioning material messiness as a form of resistance against this sleek, exoticized narratives of oriental art?

SPEAKER_00 46:36

Yeah. Like I think that is I haven't I haven't said it as articulate articulately, but yes, I think. But the other um thing that I am really interested in at the moment is artists' archives, you know, and as an artist myself, sometimes it's like it's the diaries, it's the sketches with the scribbles, the paintbrushes, the crap on the floor, it's the ESO with the that where they've written the thing. That actually unlocks a lot of what the artist was thinking and what I've been finding really fascinating. So when I was speaking about speaking to Julie about how to, I guess, design, for lack of a better term, the exhibition. I thought I I said I really want to bring some of the archival material into the exhibition to kind of unlock and create a narrative, but also as a point of contrast to the literal frame of the on the Nicolas Chevalier work. And what what you find there is often I have reference walls and I print them out, print images out on A4 copy paper and literally just stick them up on blue tape when I'm making things. And then I also draw with ink on butcher's paper, and I always draw on butcher's paper because because of the cheapness of it, I feel like I can be the most free. Um which is you know very different to making a large bronze sculpture, for example. Um, but I also thought it was increasingly important to bring audiences into the multitude of references that go into one sculpture, you know, like that kind of polymorphism, that kind of multiplicity, I think is unlocked through this kind of what I might even consider some kind of photo or visual essay about how the um work was made. Because in the actual vitrine, there are all my glaze tests.

SPEAKER_01 48:33

Um I meant seeing them in your studio. They're sharing them.

SPEAKER_00 48:37

Well, I often make glaze tests in like ceramics land. People often make little tiles, but I make little figures because I need to see how the glaze animates the form.

SPEAKER_01 48:48

And so, and so I suppose it gets back to what we were talking about in the beginning, in a way, in terms of those parallel and sort of multifaceted ways of looking at things. It's not just one way, one picture or one view. So I think you've made that point. And just quickly before we move on to the project here, why the interchangeable heads? Was that is that just an extension of that shifting or you know, brilliant identity?

SPEAKER_00 49:16

Well, I was all I was really interested in this idea of sculpture as something that wasn't fixed. And making work in ceramics a lot of the time. People perceive it to be so fragile, but it is a fired glaze ceramic. It's one of the most it can last the test of time, you know, unless you take a hammer to it. It's it's such an amazing I bet you use sometimes. Yeah. Um, but um the interchangeability uh I think was really me also trying to provoke imagination because I I was in two minds about the presentation. Part of me wanted to present all the pieces of the sculpture as a kind of flat pack, so in this dry, um almost data-like sense of just having the largest part to the smallest part in a line, um, including all the accessories. And I looked at that and I thought, interesting, but there is always something about bringing the putting the whole sculpture together that for me at least, um, there's some kind of emotional resonance that's very different to that kind of dry archival sentiment around display. And I think for that work, I think it was quite important for that emotionality to be embedded in it.

SPEAKER_01 50:42

It was wild. Let's talk about your current project for love of love of fart. Um, mast two, three, and four. The installation we have here features three large hand-built ceramic wall masts and miniature bronze faces. And as we've just seen, masts have recurred throughout your practice. And you've touched a bit on what draws them to you, but I thought we could we could be more specific given that these are, I have to say, these are the biggest, most developed, I'm proud to say, masts I've seen you do.

SPEAKER_00 51:18

Yep. Um there was a couple of things I thought on a very basic level, I thought it was quite interesting to have to be in a bathroom and be kind of confronted with multiple eyes upon you.

SPEAKER_01 51:32

You know, like there was something from my own little experience here at Ramesh, it is. I've been in here an hour now.

SPEAKER_00 51:41

And you know, behind the door, I think if you're actually going in to use the bathroom, you close it, and then you also get the the little bronze pendants on the wall as another surprise of lots of faces looking at you. So on a very basic level, and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to explore um this mask and this face motif and this interplay between, you know, being watched and being looked at and being observed and the voyeuristic tendencies, you know, all those things are playing in my mind. But it I think those large ceramic works, I think, are also very per I'd say they're quite they have a real personal dimension for me. And it's a really when I gestured earlier to this idea of encountering a lot of um masks from Sri Lanka as a tourist when I was 11, 12, 13, 14, and literally buying them in the form of fridge magnets, which you can also do with specific types of Indonesian masks, for example. I was really interested in the kind of exotic trade, you know, of um these vernacular and these kinds of cultural objects. But also when I would scope, when I would look at the Sri Lankan Yaka masks and observe them, I I almost felt like I had discovered my um aesthetic register, like the history or the the birthplace of my aesthetic register.

SPEAKER_01 53:06

Fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 53:07

You know, and because I'll send you some pictures of um them and I'll show you the book that I have as well. And for me, there was that, there was that. And I thought, what does it mean now to think about this lineage within the context of a symbol that I've iterated throughout my whole practice? You know, an interchangeable head is like a mask. A glaze, you know, is a glass, is a is glass, you know, that's fused over play. That's art mask. Sometimes, you know, my large sculptures are built in multiple parts and the heads come off and on. Um, sometimes there are multiple heads, there are multiple faces. And but I was also interested in the um, I think there's also a sense of if we go a little bit psychoanalytic, there's some kind of archetype reference. I think people can really emote and engage with this idea. You know, I think there's some universality that crosses cultures with this idea of um masks. I think, you know, a lot of our identities are built upon different iterations. We have so many digital avatars. Um, I feel like it's just such a um fertile ground to explore contemporary culture, but also gesture to really interesting historical perspectives.

SPEAKER_01 54:22

And this the scale, I mean, was it the tiny nature of this space that um that triggered your your wish to make these huge or with scale these masks up? Because it it's fabulous to come in and I mean it really is confrontational in the best sense. Um to walk in and be confronted with these personas.

SPEAKER_00 54:45

Um well I was also I think I was also when I was making them, there's so much detail on them. And when you go really up close, you can see all the different tools, you can see all the different pigments. Um, there's a real, I guess, um, indulgence with materiality. And I think having the viewer actually be forced to look up close, I think can actually create a connection between them and the actual process of making the thing.

SPEAKER_01 55:15

And I was so glad you mentioned that actually, because I would like you to talk a bit about your because your process is very involved and it's more like building something you know, you know. So do go on with that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:28

So with making these, um, I kind of carved out these um almost like molds out of rigid foam. Then I covered them in plastic, slumped big slabs of clay over them to get the shape, and then I started building up and using tools um to build the form. Then once they were dry, I take them off the bowls, buy them and glaze them over four separate occasions to get that kind of painterly uh sentiment built on top of them. And I trained in painting and drawing when I went to university, and it's really that methodology that has, I think, given me the skills to create surfaces like this, where there's transparent, opaque, gloss, semi-gloss, matte, uh, warm, cool, like all of those kinds of um theoretical, pedagogical, formal approaches to colour and surface come from a painting, language, and philosophy. And the works are really labor-intensive, but they're also really time-intensive. So there's elements of a work like this that was built in one sitting. So the actual building of the actual mask with the clay, with the raw clay, I try and do in a day. I try and do in one sitting because I think there's something, if the purest in me feels like this kind of expression needs one sitting of building rather than this fastidious process of building something, wrapping it really intensely, and then coming back, working on a bit. Um, but and a lot of them, what I will say is it's also quite a risky way to work where a lot of them don't work out, you know, because how many would you have made in making these four here? I made a bit correct. I made seven to get four. Right. So you're looking at just a bit over um 50%, and that's that's a technical thing that some don't work, but it's also a compositional thing. I think some when you're working in an aesthetic that is quite immediate, you have to accept that risk means failure sometimes, and the failure is fine.

SPEAKER_01 57:32

Well, I suppose it's that that brings the immediacy to the objects that you create. I think it's the other way around.

unknown 57:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:38

Well, you've been to the studio.

SPEAKER_01 57:40

They feel very studied and uh remote.

SPEAKER_00 57:43

Yeah, no, that's I actually feel like the technology associated with making ceramics generates a lot of anxiety to with makers. Um, it's the fact that you're like offering these things that you spent so much time building to these machines that put them under extraordinary temperatures, and you just have to hope for the best. So I have a lot of sympathy, um, you know, and compassion for makers who approach it like that because I know what it's like to give your heart and soul to these objects that are then completely vulnerable and sometimes perish just by nature of the medium.

SPEAKER_01 58:22

I love the way you use the word perish.

SPEAKER_00 58:24

Very it sounds dramatic, but it's true. Like they can explode and they become dust and rubble.

SPEAKER_01 58:32

Not for the faint-hearted.

SPEAKER_00 58:34

No, no. Well, this style at least.

SPEAKER_01 58:37

Uh, and so so having built the actual work in one sitting, then putting on the glazes is a very layered and a very technical process, says, isn't it? I mean, there's two things. There's knowing where to start and then when to start, I presume.

SPEAKER_00 58:54

Yeah. You know, so many people, a question that always comes up in the studio in talks is how do you know when it's finished? And my interpretation of that is with this kind of semi-maximal aesthetic, there's a potential to go on forever. You know, you can keep layering, you can keep going. And what I have realized is that there's a couple of things at play. And to make something feel maximal, to feel energetic, to feel unrestrained, you actually have to have a lot of rules. You know, you to make it register like that, there are a lot of like you actually have to, for example, limit your palette, you know, to make it look colorful. Yeah, which is a which is a weird oh yeah, like you have to limit your palette to make something look colorful. Um, you know, you have to think about warm and cool. You have to actually think about the size of the gestures and contrast the different sizes of the gestures sometimes. So sometimes there are these little things that through time I've been able to intuitively um become attuned to. But sometimes otherwise, it's just reminding myself that you know, don't counterbalance, don't have a bit of red there, a bit of red there, a bit of red there, because that'll even out the surface. So so there are little, there are kind of compositional rules, but at the same time, when often the feeling of being finished is an intuitive moment.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:22

Yeah, I I I I can see that. And I think we're about to reach that moment with this, with this uh talk remesh. Um thank you so much for taking part in our Love for Art project and for taking the time to do this interview. It's been such a pleasure working and speaking with you. And we'll put this interview on our website. And huge thanks also to Elora Shabastaba for producing this project and Monik Sproul for research. And of course, Ramesh's gallery, Sullivan and Strump. So goodbye, everybody. Goodbye, Ramesh.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:55

Thank you, thank you.