Photo: Samrat Bandodkar
Look around. Be it the colours of the pretty flowers that adorn the sidewalks or the various creatures creeping round the place or the way the trees shade the roads, creating interesting patterns on the ground, beauty is truly everywhere. And it is this beauty that artist Priya Sundaravalli seeks to emulate with her pristine works of art.
Having completed her medical degree in India and two engineering degrees from the USA, Sundaravalli got into pottery quite by chance. “I was doing my PhD at the University of Michigan where we were given the opportunity of taking one free course in any other department. So I enrolled for pottery classes at the School of Art,” recalls Sundaravalli. It was there that she found her guru in master micaceous potter and Jicarilla Apache medicine man Felipe Ortega of New Mexico. “The way they (member of Jicarilla Apache) look at clay is very different. For them it is not just a tool of art, it is like Mother Earth. All of nature is alive for them,” says Sundaravalli. “This appealed to my inner sensibilities.”
Indeed, although she took up ceramics at a later age, Sundaravalli discloses that she was always fascinated with the art form. “In middle school I won a prize for attendance and was given a book on pottery. Although I had no knowledge of working with clay, I was fascinated by how lumps of earth could be moulded into forms and figurines,” she reveals. “Also as a young girl in Madurai, I used to play in the garden with coconut shells and assemble god figurines out of them.”
And while she deeply enjoyed doing ceramic art, for a long time, this was nothing more than just a hobby. “I worked as a journalist for awhile and then as a freelance science teacher in the Auroville village schools. However, after a certain point I felt that I had to listen to my inner voice. So I took a sabbatical and went back to America to explore my art further and gradually it turned into a full time thing,” she says.
Sundaravalli has since had three solo exhibitions in Auroville and one in South Korea where she did a residency programme at the Clayarch Gimhae Museum. “South Korea can be said to be the parent nation of pottery and even Japan takes its influence from here. It is possible that because of the constant attacks from Japan and China and because of the language issue they have not gotten as much recognition,” she believes. Apart from this, Sundaravalli's art installations are also on permanent display at 'Jay He' at T2, Mumbai international airport which is the largest public art museum in the world.
Her current exhibition at Gallery Gitanjali as expected draws inspiration heavily from nature. “When I am in the process of creating I don't usually go in with any fixed idea on what I am going to create or about how I will display it. In fact some of the pieces that form part of this collection were lying around for the last two or three years and I suddenly discovered that they fit in with this theme. Hence I decided to title it 'SYN.APSE '. Synapse is the space between two nerves where the signals are jumping. So it is like jumping into the void and seeing what happens,” she says, adding that she had a preview of the show, a week ago, for her people in Auroville, a place responsible for much of her inspiration. “Auroville is so multi cultural and is rich in life. It is amazing how the land that was dead and eroded in 1968 was brought back to life and reforested,” she states. “The place is like an untamed wilderness and the forest has a life of its own. It is not unusual to see water snakes or tortoise in your backyard. And after 13 years of living here, it all tends to seep into you and affect you. You learn about living in balance and harmony with nature.”
