A faraway squirrel chirps incessantly as we begin our conversation. We sit under the dappled shade of a tree, Johnny, the resident dog of Lalit Kala Akademi, slouched next to us. All of this — the squirrel, the dog, and the play of sunlight on the ground through leaves — have emerged in the art of K. Benitha Perciyal. Her works, in essence, contain a bit of Nature. The city-based, 36-year-old is one among the 94 artists, from across the world, who is participating at the ongoing Kochi Muziris Biennale.
For Benitha, art is all about the process, about memories, transformation, and uncertainty; her canvas is space. She believes that good art “should never be striking; it should create conversation, make you recall a memory”. The ancient room in Fort Kochi, where she has displayed her works at the Biennale, will stay on in the minds of visitors because of the memories that the sights and smells will make them recall. She has recreated Christ’s crucifixion, his Palm Sunday March, and The Last Supper using material that’s part of many religious rituals — incense.
With the nearby sea as a constant spectator, Benitha worked in the room for eight months to create the work of art. A Christian herself, she says she chose to create Christian imagery since it was in Kochi that St. Thomas landed, hundreds of years ago. “A new religion spread from this bit of land,” she says. Also, all of Christ’s disciples travelled by sea. “The language of the sea was not new to them.”
The Christ that Benitha has created is her expression of the faces she encountered. The disciples are all men she knows or has observed. Some of them are loadmen at George Town, where her studio is located. The first time Benitha arrived at the room, it lay in disuse. She got down to repair it, for, “as an artist, when I saw a crack in the wall, I first wanted to restore it.” For over two weeks, Benitha worked just on the floor. “My works are like my children. I want to ensure they live in a comfortable place.”
She cleared the floor, layer-by-layer till the building’s original stone floors were revealed. Using material such as limestone and the stucco method that was originally used in its construction, she brought it alive. For the life-size structures too she employed the stucco method; she cast them using a mixture of incense, jaggery, limestone, kadukkai , cinnamon, and cloves.
The Christ Benitha created does not have hands — much like the figures she observed in the cramped antique shops of nearby Mattancherry. In these shops, Benitha discovered that a piece of worship “became a commodity” once it lost a piece of its body.
With a window open to let the sea breeze in, the room is witness to a transformation. Each sculpture inside is changing with each passing day. No one knows what will become of them — not even their creator. It’s this “uncertainty” that Benitha wants to explore. She is fascinated by the conversations she had with her volunteer-helper at the Biennale, whom she calls ‘everyday’. “He would tell me, ‘today the room was filled with the overpowering smell of the sea’; ‘it was humid today, so the room smelled of sweat’ and so on,” she smiles. “A crack has appeared on a sculpture and he reports on its development every day,” she smiles.
A native of the temple town of Thiruvannamalai, Benitha holds a Masters in Painting from the Government College of Fine Arts. Even though she trained to work with poster and water colours, she took to natural colours and materials a few years after college. She has extracted colours from the bark of a tree and tea; has used shells and spices in her art. People or situations that affect her somehow find expression in her works.
Jerry, an orphaned squirrel she rescued from Lalit Kala Akademi, has scurried his way into several of her works. “He was with me for seven years,” says Benitha. “He just ran away into the wild one day.” Seeds are another recurring theme. “The seed, to me, is a metaphor for growth, transformation, the female form... the seed can be anything,” she explains.
The seed was sown in her in her early days as an artist. “When I was at my aunt’s in Saidapet in the year 2000, I would see a cotton tree at the bus stop every morning, she recalls. The pod that burst out seeds, fascinated her. She observed its changing forms — it dried, shrivelled, and one day, fell off the branch. This stayed on in her mind, taking new forms and meanings.
Benitha wants to further build on her work at the Biennale. She’s not completely satisfied with it. “I wanted it to give one the feeling of being inside a cramped antique shop in the area,” she says. Her works and her subjects, in a way, never leave her. Jerry, for instance, is present in her kitchen, in the form of an arugamanai ; the blade is shaped like his fluffy, curved tail.
The mystery room
In a tiny room that branches off from the one that features her works at the Biennale, Benitha has set up a glass case of tiny ittar bottles she collected over many years from antique shops. This room, which also houses artefacts such as the faces and hands she has cast, cannot be entered. “Visitors can only view it from the outside,” she explains. She calls the perfume case a “memory glass box”. “Each bottle inside has a story to it; each has, within it, a different smell. It was bottled by someone, was bought by another, and was used by another person. Some of them cannot be opened; the caps are jammed…” she pauses. “We will never know what smells they hold.”
