9th - 15th March 2018

Visual Arts Gallery,
India Habitat Centre,
Delhi, India.

Porcelain 2018, presented by the Delhi Blue Pottery Trust, the show celebrates 10 years of porcelain art in India.

The 'Mess is More' collection was created as a response to this historical pattern. It features cleaning accesories and supplies - perhaps amongst some of the most inconsequemtial objects of our time - which have been crafted out of porcelain. Cleaning agents represent opposite of glory: they are readily available, cheap, and discarded without much thought. But by using porcelain to create the objects, the collection aims to de-stabilize the way in which we assign value to certain materials.

By transforming what is traditionally valued into that which is traditionally undervalued, this series on the descent of this formerly invaluable, inaccessible and highly coveted ceramic.

As a graphic artist, I have always been drawn to the exploration of shape and form. However, I have only recently begun to use the medium of clay, which has enabled me to move beyond the limits of two dimensional space into the undiscovered third dimensional space.

As an artist and designer, I am interested in the processes through which we struggle to restore the delicate balance missing from our lives and society at large. The use of clay, an inherently fragile material, is intended to evoke a sense of empathy, whilst hinting at the fragility of the human condition in a more general sense. In a world ruled by the normative logic of capital, where narcissism rules and commodities are fetishized, I have worked to create a series of humble, hand-crafted objects to remind us not only of the subjective value of human relationships and human labour, but also of the social function of art.

"There are the pleasures of being envied and the pleasures of being feared and the pleasures of looking down on a sea of new possession but of all the pleasures, More is the only thing that works." Edmond De Waal, British artist and potter.

We value things that are hard to come by. the harder they are to acquire, the more we want them. However, inevitably, once we process these objects of lust, their value diminishes, and all that is left behind is the wrekage generated by the pursuit.

For centuries, porcelain was considered as white gold - a material of the elite, for the elite. Kings and emperors craved and killed for it, and it was associated with power, glory, beauty and greed. Gradually it began to be coveted amongst the middle classes, who would save a large fraction of their income to acquire this precious material. Today, porcelain is no longer a restricted commodity - its past aura and appeal is much diminished.