You’re too tall, you’re going to have to bend,” laughs artist Sheetal Gattani, as she guides me to a spot marked out with masking tape on the floor.
I’m at the Chemould Prescott Road Gallery, Fort. Gattani has been working on her site-specific sculptural installations — designed to work with the gallery’s extant structural pillars — since May 15 as part of an artist-in-residency programme.
The spot she wants to me to stand on is one of the vantage points where one of the pieces, its components spread out over two sets of pillars and the wall 15 feet away, comes together as a composite image.
After much twisting and turning, I finally see it: two charcoal-sketched hands in the classic ‘framing’ pose. It’s a knowing, light-hearted wink at the audience’s contribution to this particular set of works.
3D nostalgiaStill a work in progress when I visited the gallery, Gattani’s 46 Pillars maps out three dimensional cityscapes, contrasting the lit-up night skyline’s sleek, almost comic-noir qualities with a daytime charcoal city that is blurry with nostalgia. Alongside the more architectural images are what Gattani calls nostalgic ‘specimens’: an old phone instrument, a postcard, a cup of cutting chai. As you walk from vantage point to vantage point, piecing together the many pillars into these images, a narrative starts to emerge.
These experiments with perspective and narrative are a strong departure from Gattani’s early work as an abstract painter. She is known for thickly layered, roughly textured watercolour paintings that fellow abstractionist Mehlli Gobhai described as “paintings that seem to be throbbing new life-forms from another world yet to be created and totally her own.”
Gattani says of the change in her approach: “The last show I had [at Chemould] was the take-off point to me moving very subtly towards three dimensions. In that show, I had just cut the canvas and you know, just cut and depressed or raised parts of it. So the 3D element was already coming in.”
Over the past few years, Gattani has been working on a series of light sculptures, and also created a work for GVK’s Jaya He Museum at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. Both those experiences have informed 46 Pillars , which was initially conceived in Gattani’s home studio. “I was making some small pieces, making a lot of strips that came together kind of like a bamboo,” she says. “They eventually evolved into a sculpture that looked like bamboos at a construction site. But when I came to Chemould, I realised there are existing pillars, and those bamboos would look too weak here.”
In residencyWhen Gattani proposed the concept to gallery director Shireen Gandhy, she insisted that “you have to do this here, this can’t be done anywhere else.” The gallery is now an open studio, where people can make an appointment to come in and see the artist at work.
This must be a bit disconcerting for an artist who is known to be a reclusive worker who prefers to paint in ‘solitary confinement’. “I don’t even put on a fan when I’m painting, because even that vibration disturbs me,” Gattani says. “I need total stillness. This is different because there are images involved and I’m also working with a narrative in my own head. I’m letting the space tell me how it goes, of course, but it’s different.”
The open studio experience has been a mixed bag, though largely positive, for Gattani. But that wasn’t the only challenge of working at Chemould. Being an old heritage building with questionable structural integrity, there were a lot of restrictions to where Gattani could place her 46 wooden pillars. But she used the limitations to her advantage, jettisoning many of the images she had planned to use in favour of ones that emerged while working with the space. “We covered the whole floor with graph paper to figure out the placement of pillars, because we can’t touch the false ceiling. So, most of these images have come while in the flow here. It’s still very process-based, and though I came in with some preconceived ideas, this space just demanded a lot more.”
Gattani will be artist-in-residence at the gallery till August 30 and her two-and-a-half months of labour will bear fruit when the exhibition opens to the public on August 3. While Mumbai, a city she loves unconditionally, and its architecture, have been the starting point for many of these images, she says the work explores everyday experiences and how we make sense of them. “I’m talking about the city, but I’m also talking about life experience or any experience for that matter where things don’t make sense till at some point it all comes together and they do.”
The author is a freelance writer
