Ivy Zaman’s Brave World of Sculpture speaks of the invincible spirit of an artist, who for over 30 years have been painstakingly working in several mediums of art to reach her own pinnacle which happens to rest on her skills and devotion as an indefatigable sculptor. She refused to confine herself in a comfortable niche and braved multiple paths that instead of throwing her off the kilter have strengthened her prowess as an artist. As one scans the display at Nalinikanta Bhattashali gallery, despite the fact that there remains much to be desired, artworks of different genres leap off their mount to greet the viewer in all their splendour as something born of deep passion. She in the catalogue has expressed her lifelong covenant with nature, which she carried close to her heart while training as a student and practicing as an artist. Her choice of materials, wood, cement, stone and metal espouses the deep resonance of the essentially natural which remarkably has been left to its own forms and rhythms to find its echo in the oeuvre that is presented.
At the entrance stands an installation work replicating realistically a fishing trap with a circular metal hanging from above at eye level in the representation of the moon. This marks the character of almost all her artworks in its bond of allegiance to forms found in reality. This simplistic interpretation of her immediate surroundings, and acquired thoughts are laid out in equally simple forms with no pretext of high-falutin philosophical goose-chase. Her personal composure reflects in her works avouching that the artist is not apart from her art. The unvaried emotive pitch renders her works a unilinearity that is quite heart-warming, since it does not baffle the mind but rather soothes it. She shied away from all riotous trends of so-called social activism; the remote link to issues of current import has been touched upon with a kindly overture in a painting where Buddha is painted in a warm red as an enquiry into the state of affairs in Myanmar that violated the teachings of Buddha. Her ensemble shares a common thread of a pared down approach, until one places oneself before the canvases seemingly turned into a playground for earthly elements to frolic with each other and progressively culminate into a narrative of cumulative layers that build on each other as colour is applied over colour, brush-strokes forming newer contours in an ever- transforming spree. In a dispersal of weight and gravity the sculptures appear to have come to be through just as much of a natural process. The flatness, and unfaltering lines in lieu of curves do not transcribe into an unwieldy rigidity, instead, the mass and volume becomes only so much visible inscription on space itself. The ghost of Novera Ahmed lingers in these overt samplers of modernist tradition, which undeniably is an obvious marker of the assembled pieces. What stands out is the Time Keeper, a bust studded with small wrist-watches but, yet again, it’s the craftsmanship that evidently fascinates one, for surely one might not read any ironic commentary on a time it decidedly averts from assigning itself to. What elevates it is its timeless beauty! If one may choose to pit another piece of work against it, it would be Portrait, a bronze casting that resulted out of a workshop conducted by the Indian sculptor, Tarak Garai. The emphasis is shifted from the end result towards the process and the means of making which it appears to minutely record. The edginess and the roughshod treatment imbued it with a raw vitality rarely reflected in the larger pieces that stood like ineffectual sentinels around it. The sterility of the display detracted from the pleasant aesthetic quality of the works. It begs the question whether the interior of the gallery needs to be renovated to make it less of a distraction with its elaborate woodwork on the ceiling, not to mention the utterly unimaginative splay of the rest.
The portion of a tree-trunk turned upside down that majestically occupies an impressive amount of space is a work that the sculptor did not tamper with in recognition of nature’s infallible artistry that inspires all sorts of aesthetic endeavours. Her deep faith in primal nature, the wellspring of sustenance and reinforcement of human spirit time and again renewed her lust for a spirituality that does not deny one one’s tryst with the earthly coils, but, help arrange the fragmented, multiple selves of the ‘modern being’ into a congruent existence. She returns to Buddha much like her predecessor Novera, as a metaphor of one’s desire for a spiritual anchorage. Spiritual Flight is the title of one of the pieces. It is an arrested flight, a transcendence that still retains its roots in the earthly bedrock, nonetheless, an attempt at harnessing the energy that flows out from the inner compulsion to connect to the source and this is what encloses her sculptures with a whisper that, ‘this is not the end’.
One would like to end with a nod to the painting rendered in shades of blue, where if one stretches one’s imagination it seems a river flows in the sky mirroring the ground beneath. The sensuality of the sweeping strokes coupled with an unabashed freedom of form can only point at a restrained anarchic impulse that quietly seethes below the surface and hardly ever breaks through! Ivy Zaman is an explorer, and there is much more yet to be received from this passionate artist.
Brave World of Sculpture continues from June 25 to July 10 at National Museum, Shahbag.