Artist Pushpamala’s new show offers a glimpse into ancient manuscripts and texts

Artist Pushpamala N is renowned for her experimental and intriguing photo and video work. Her feminist narratives have played a significant part in establishing her as one of the most thought-provoking artists in the contemporary art scene.

However, this weekend, Pushpamala takes the path less travelled. The artist is presenting her new sculpture work, a solo show titled Epigraphica Indica. In a candid conversation, the artist reveals that she has dabbled in this discipline during the last decade but as it is a challenging task to work with metal, it has taken her a few years to make all the 150 works that she is presenting.

It all began when she attended a sculpture workshop in Gwalior where she discovered bahi kathas, cloth-bound books used to keep accounts. “I bought 30 books in different shapes and sizes, and I asked bronze casters to cast these in the metal. Some of this work is at the Gwalior library,” she recollects. This work triggered an interest and led Pushpamala to create the pieces in this show — Atlas of Rare And Lost Alphabets and Nara, two sets of copper plate sculptures with etchings and inscriptions.

Her interest in the ethnography, epigraphy and inscriptions of the 19th century, motivated her to develop these two sets of sculptures. The 100 sculptures called Atlas of Rare and Lost Alphabets were inspired by a display that she saw during one of her visits to the archaeological museum of Bangalore. “I saw these tamrashasanas (copper plates) from the 15th and 16th centuries. These are documents of different kinds, mainly land records. I thought the plates were interesting, and something I could recreate in my studio,” she says.

As a result, Pushpamala explored more ancient scripts, and in 2015, she started work on these sculptures which are painstakingly made by hand. They look like mysterious ancient documents. “I have mixed up letters from ancient languages, documents and manuscripts. The alphabets I have recreated are authentic. I felt like an old monk copying and writing,” explains Pushpamala. While Atlas of Rare and Lost Alphabets explores the lesserknown and forgotten languages and scripts of the world, Nara commemorates slogans, poems and text that were used in recent public protests in India.

Text and images are etched on copper plates, treated with patina and framed to look like slates. “I was working with epigraphy and I wanted to expand it. That’s when I thought of commemorating poems and text from the protests that I had participated in. I am not at all a poetry person but I got so excited with the wonderful poetry that I heard at these gatherings, and wanted to memorialise them,” she signs off.

March 12-April 16. At Gallery Sumukha, Wilson Garden
ayeshatabassum@ newindianexpress.com
@aishatax