• Subodh Kerkar

The artist says, “I would like to think of myself as an ocean artist.  Once I open up the space I work in and take my studio to the beach, the sea becomes both my muse and my medium.  I am then one with the sea, the creator and the created, the mentor and the disciple.

When I dig trenches in the sand and light up mussel shells on their edges, I am offering homage to the sea.  When I mix glass with parts of used boats, I try to evoke the boats’ ‘memory of the sea’.  Glass when lit becomes water, solid turns into liquid and within the womb of the boat, and glass in turn remembers sand.”

The artist uses very little man-made material in his installations, and uses them only so long as they evoke more primal forms and elements.  The boat and water, glass and sand, metal and earth.

As the saint, poets once brought art to the people, away from the courts and made art of the people. Today’s artist too must create art in the world of the people, away from the galleries. Their work must talk to them and their lives and memories must speak through their work.  

The artist says, “My boat must remember the perilous journeys it has made, the carpenters’ hands, the fishermen’s songs, the impressions of their bodies on its surfaces. It must remember life in the sea and lives around the sea.  My art then becomes a mnemonic device and through it I give back to the sea what it has given me.”