The Fine Art of Sculpture

I was looking for a material that was around the house which had an interesting shape which inturn could be used to express my concepts and ideas.   One shape got my attention more than others. This was the coconut shells. Always seen as a byproduct after cooking where its insides are used and the exterior mostly thrown away. The shape and the form intrigued me, ‘How could something so hard, house something so important’ I should know this, because I’m married into a Malayalee family who use coconuts for almost every kind of dish they prepare. This aspect of the coconut was something I need to bring out in my work, as the shape was much defined and I felt almost lead to do this piece.   I began my work by first collecting the shells. This was a long process and you usually don’t find only the shells in the market. Every time I used a coconut while cooking, I made sure that I cracked the nut carefully, without getting the splinters all around and then stashed them away.
Meanwhile, I started researching on the coconut as a material. Unlike my other works where first comes the concept, and then I decide to use a material that best suits the idea, in this case, I worked the other way round.  Just to know the extent of the uses of the coconut, a simple search on Wikipedia shows the innumerable ways the ‘lowly’ shell was used. It was even once used by a president of the Unites States, which adorned his desk during his presidency and is now kept in the John F. Kennedy Library.
While I was collecting these shells, I could somehow relate to someone who would collect stamps and coins. I began to think about this human behavior where somethings simple and seemingly unusable, we have a hard time throwing away things which we think might be precious some day. In the case of the stamps and old coins, they don’t hold an intrinsic value, but to the collectors it’s more precious than Gold.
While I was collecting these shells, I also looked at forms that could be associated to them and one such form really caught my attention. I found an interesting brass bowl, locked away in one of my relative’s shelf. They have been collecting brass ware for generations and are proud of it. I’m sure they never used it for its functional value but treasured for its emotional value. These brass bowls was very similar in shape and form to the coconut shell, probably could even be used for a similar function, but still managed to make the shelf, were as the coconut made it to the dust bin.
In my final work, I wanted the coconut shell and the brass bowl to share the same platform which brought them both to a similar value and status. This work also looks at a difference they have, where the shells are symbolic of nature and the brass bowl of human’s innovation, knowledge, workmanship and their skill in an assembly line.