Opening at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, on 22nd June, artist, and installation sculptor Bharti Kher’s Alchemies springs out of an album of reflections, references and experiences. Spanning more than two decades of work old and new , Alchemies is curated across the light-filled spaces of YSP’s largest gallery and surrounding garden celebrating Kher’s extraordinary sculptures, representing different approaches of her career.
The exhibition will include four significant outdoor bronze sculptures, and a large clay work that will be made outside the gallery so that visitors can watch the construction process. Her sculptures play with dichotomies, the hybrid women figures strong and vulnerable at the same time. Shield has a gorgeous feminine figure whose shield is a huge banana leaf and her cloak is a shirt that hangs from graceful antlers. The antlers look cumbersome but add an air of magic.
Ancestor 
Kher’s most epic outing was at New York’s Central Park where her Ancestor stood for more than a year as part of a Public Art Fund (2023) venture, when she said : “I invite viewers to leave their wishes, dreams and prayers with ‘Ancestor’; and to pass on their wisdom of living and love to the next generation. She is the keeper of all memories and time. A vessel for you to travel into the future, a guide to search and honour our past histories, and a companion — right here, right now — in New York City.”
Ancestor comes to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park as a marker of human testimonies. Her upheld hand which evokes a mudra blessing emblematic of Buddhist and Hindu imagery — with 23 children emerging from her body like flowering buds on a tree will engage visitors in London like nothing else.
Kher has been an avant garde artist ever since she began, it was in 2016 that her sojourn of reconfiguring vintage ceramic objects from South India, resulted in her series Intermediaries. The original ceramics range from depictions of animals to gods, but Kher uses them as hybrid transformations to create “new avatars.” Kher’s hand-painted pigment and patina bronze of “Ancestor,” cast in London , gives the sculpture the appearance of antiquity in ceramic, suggesting that it has stood at YSP for years.
Intermediaries , 2018
Kher’s painted bronze sculpture stands 4.8m high and is one of the first pieces you encounter from the South East corner of the park. The Intermediary Family invites us to consider a transitional space in the present – somewhere between the concept of truth and actual reality. This notion of the go-between or mediums has fascinated Kher throughout her career, often resulting in unlikely pairings becoming hybrids, often half-female forms. This work ,was shown at Frieze Sculpture and is considered amongst her “new avatars.”
Lady with an Ermine, 2012
The spiked, pronged, claw with the tall figure made of resin, granite, wood, fur, leather, and ceramic fuse to create a startling stunner in Lady with an Ermine. Kher’s sculptural style is at once elegant and eclectic, the image created seems contradictory, anything but obvious, the title itself offers a narrative value of depth and density as it refers to the themes of colonialism, Indian society and traditions. She takes the slender full cast body and adds allegorical accents to create a portrait of an urban goddess filled with metaphors of a powerful physicality. Theatrical and equivocal it forms visitation of a time traveller replete with modern day cups and saucers that become the tall animated crown. While the material at once signifies perfection and fragility it is the patter of paradoxes that catch the human gaze.
A collector of materials and meaning, Kher’s work invites us into ‘a world of objects and a world of words’, weaving between magical, mythical, spiritual, and scientific realms. Drawing upon bodily senses she creates her own ‘hand-brain-body-art-language’ – ‘I hear it, taste it, eat it, write it, draw it’ – explored here in both two and three-dimensional forms.
Cloud Walker ,2013
At the heart of her signature sculptures that seem to traverse mythologies is the woman’s body-the woman as mother, monster, mannequin, goddess, warrior even prostitute. Within the process of the making there is an intimacy of engagement and an articulation that presents a silent soliloquy.
Cloud Walker (2013) a surreal image is born from the Tibetan mythology of Dakinis, the women that walk the skies and embody all things feminine is a wrap around your senses work that traps your gaze.
In an interview Kher said she was triggered by the histories throughout history of both goddesses and human forms as ever-changing energies of the force of truth. Perhaps both a fierce and compassionate divinity that exists between worlds, between sleeping and waking, life and death.
Animus Mundi , 2018
The exhibition foregrounds narratives of hybrid legends .The mannequin with the bovine head is a flashback to the grace and gravitas of Greco Roman tales as well as the central ideas of Kher’s process.At Nature Morte when she had her solo exhibition she reflected that Animus Mundi was the centre of the universe where all things converge. A connection between all living things, the vital force in a world that carries all human and animal energies.
Years before she had said: “ All the art that I love comes from the tradition of reduction. When I think about the purest form, it really goes back to the intention of the object and the integrity of the object with its narrative and name.”
And All The While The Benevolent Slept, 2008
The headless figure with a skull in one hand and a cup and saucer in the other, is Chinamesta, the goddess of contradictions. Here the headless sculpture is yet another manifestation of multiple metaphors. Kher adds in a conversation with Aveek Sarkar: “ Kali saves the world again while Shiva sleeps. She is life giver and a life taker, heroic, terrifying and erotic.”
The title is at once quixotic and quaint, the cup and saucer in the hands of the headless human , a composite of paradoxes and contradictions, sitting perhaps between somewhere and nowhere simultaneously, a coalesced configuration of materials like fibre glass, porcelain ,plastic, mahogany wood and copper wires creating its own universe and a distinct dialogue. Kher calls this a “push and pull of material and meaning,” the fluctuations between time and space akin to the flow of breath in and out of the body.
Evoking Sarojini Naidu’s Bangle sellers
Kher’s on the spot installation of red and black bangles Bloodline ( 2000 ) at the YSP is a cynosure for all eyes, men and women, boys and girls of all ages. The deep wine toned bangles at once create a cornucopia of conversations. We remember our ancestors we recall Indian women who have celebrated and worn bangles as teenagers, for festivals and for their weddings. We remember women who have broken their bangles when they were widowed, and those who secretly didn’t want to break but threw them into ponds and rivers and lakes and seas in absolute angst.
These bangles bring back Sarojini Naidu’s poem of bangle sellers who sell their bangles at a temple fair. The poet calls bangles “lustrous tokens of radiant lives”. Bangles bring happiness to daughters and wives .When they are silver and blue they reflect the mountain mist representing freshness of youth. When red and pink they represent tender flower buds. Kher’s bangles are deep red/black and they echo the essence of Indian traditions in a sweep of accents that go back to antiquity. With this installation Kher becomes an art historian ,a cultural theorist who maps feminine ardour and allure. In an unconscious vein these bangles pay tribute to India’s first woman Governor of Provinces the nationalist and poet Sarojini Naidu.
Kher is no stranger to public art projects. She has been part of Frieze as well as Yorkshire Sculpture Park unveilings. Each sculpture stands as if compelled to create a corollary of the haunts of history.
Kher’s titles tell us of her love for reading both contemporary as well as archival reams. Each title spells the equivocal elegance of great authors. At the YSP everyone can partake of the experiences —material as well as narrative, energies happy, as well as sad while each sculpture is a dynamic signature of potential. Each work holds traces and the essence of existence. Kher makes her works sing and in the taste of her Alchemies we recall the great Petula Clarke who sang, Windmills of your mind
Like a circle in a spiral
like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
In an ever spinning wheel.
Images: Yorkshire Sculpture Park, London
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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