Analysing Single Works: “VOW” by B.H.Srinivasa Prasad

(the writeup was originally published from a Delhi-based gallery)

The raw cotton lumps ‘hidden’ within each of those yellow cloth-knots in B.H.Srinivasa Prasad’s work, titled ‘Vow’, are unavailable for sight, forever. The hidden cotton, herein, also implies the cloth that contains the former within. The cloth that covers is available for vision while the cotton is ‘hidden within’. This reading means that that which is there but out of sight form the core aspect, that too in the form of a mystery. In certain sense, a piece of cloth containing cotton can mean an object that engulfs its own primordial state. Terms like the form/shaping, rendering /skill, marks /artist’s individuality, materiality/sensibility, etc. are twin terms that form the inevitable parts of the discourse of modernist sculpture/sculptor. Cotton, a material that occupies the maximum mass of the work “Vow”, in at least two avatars—as the processed, covering material and as the ever-ambiguous raw material that agrees to be contained within–successfully ‘contest’ the solidity and Greenbergian surfacial-quality of a modernist sculptural discourse.

This dual state of a material, applied as a sculptural material in ‘Vow’, is multiply present all through. The yellow knots are suspended by red threads by ‘design’ and red threads are entangled between the knots for ‘visualisation’. The uncertainty and ambiguity of a conventionally non-sculptural material is repeatedly confirmed in this work.

Here is a sculpture that reveals more in between its elements, reveals that it conceals a lot and breaks the sculptural hegemony between the one that suspends and the one which is suspended. The whole mass tends to shift, at the blink of an eye contesting longivity with fragility, mass with space beyond itself and reason and logic with a belief, a belief that the said material is within and what is viewed as a material is actually a cover.

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Srinivasa Prasad’s earlier experience as a performer in Kannada theatre with a leftist leaning must have involuntarily led his hands to articulate these ruptures and breakages of materials, in themselves as a construct.//