Reyaz Badaruddin and Élodie Alexandre: From a home in the hills is on view at GallerySKE, New Delhi
January 20 – March 2, 2024
Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the bluesailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones—inkberry, lamb’s quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones—rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.1
Every morning, Reyaz, Élodie, and their daughter, Alif, awaken in Andretta — an artist villagenestled in the Kangra Valley of Himachal Pradesh. Conceived in the 1920s by Norah Richards, it is home to a community that has embraced generations of playwrights and artists.
Slow, long-limbed thoughts at breakfast mark the beginning of their day, as the whole sky flies in; play is never far from the impression of the creative drive, never far from the happiness of discovery in their studio2 — where the rest of the day is spent making.
GALLERYSKE presents From a home in the hills, an exhibition of works by Reyaz Badaruddin and Élodie Alexandre. Here, the lines between work and play, studio and home, are blurred to showcase artistic paths that tread between intention and chance.
Clay, a material steeped in history, is central to this body of work. As a revealer of culture, it offers proximity to a creative process that is often organic and inadvertent. And the hand(s) that shape it is everywhere in evidence — patting, pinching, squishing, rolling, punching, and painting.3 The artists, both trained ceramicists, employ this malleability to arrive at new possibilities.
Reyaz merges traditional techniques with contemporary elements, challenging formal canons of art-making. By stripping everyday objects of their functionality, he prompts reflection on the dichotomies between art and craft, old and new. Inherent to clay’s materiality is an invitation to play, tempering the hubris of artistic intention with the acknowledgment that accident and chance are endemic to all human activities4. In this process, Alif is both co-creator and play partner. Her presence introduces colour and simplicity into Reyaz’s works, offering fresh interpretations to his ongoing dialogue with the medium.
Élodie’s multi-layered ceramic pieces delve into the personal by exploring themes of motherhood and identity to narrate a story of becoming. They point to the addition of (or a response to) Alif’s voice – sometimes unexpected, and at first resisted – until fully embraced through a lens of possibility. Birth (2018) marks the beginning of this conversation, delving into an internal cataclysm to articulate episodes of postpartum depression. Through the exhibition, Élodie builds towards an active reckoning of Alif to ultimately celebrate birth – an endless beginning5.
The gallery becomes a portal into the idyll of Andretta through which viewers are invited into the warmth of the artists’ studio-home. Objects like journals, drawings, and storybooks adorn the white cube to inject into it the same sense of frolic and discovery. And in this world, Alif’s playful interruptions become opportunities for reflection and creation. Akin to a spectral thread, she is intricately woven through narrative and form, into the fabric of the artists’ practice.
The exhibition anchors itself in a spirit of openness, vulnerability, and collaboration, to ultimately offer a glimpse into the relationship between artist creation and family dynamic.
Essay by Rhea Maheshwari, independent curator and consultant based in New Delhi
Contact
post@galleryske.com
GallerySKE
A-4 Green Avenue Street Off Green Avenue
Church/Mall Road, Vasant Kunj
New Delhi 110070
India
Photos courtesy of GallerySKE
Footnotes
- Upstream: select essays; Mary Oliver; Penguin Press, New York, 2016
- Building The House; Upstream: select essays; Mary Oliver; Penguin Press, New York, 2016
- Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay; Walker; 12 June, 2009
- Peter Voulkos: Clay, Space, and Time; Collete Chattopadhyay; Sculpture Magazine, 2001
- Artist statement; From a home in the hills; Elodie Alexandre; November 2023
